Vilnius

January 1990: Lithuania was counting down its final days as part of the Soviet Union, when unexpectedly Mikhail Gorbachev visited the country. We met with contemporary witnesses in the village of Bridai. They remember the Soviet times and recall juicy details from the state visit. By Monika Griebeler and Vytenė Stašaitytė

Suddenly, there he was: Mikhail Gorbachev, together with a large entourage from Moscow, the entire Central Committee of Lithuania and the elite of the Security Service. On 12 January 1990, he travelled to Šiauliai and then to the little village of Bridai.

They had not been informed of the visit until the evening before, the residents tell us, so they had no time to do a clean up of the village. That wouldn’t have been necessary, however. Bridai had long been considered the “Pearl of the Soviet Age.” Whenever delegations came to Lithuania from friendly socialist nations, the town was presented to them as a model of Soviet productivity.


It was, however, a town that arose on burnt earth. After the Second World War, almost the entire village had been deported. All signs of Lithuanian independence were destroyed.

Tractor driver and head of state together in the limousine

Jonas Klusas then worked as a tractor driver in the kolkhoz Pirmyn! (Forward!), and had been awarded a number of certificates and medals. He was given the honour of receiving the high-ranked guest Gorbachev at his home. Today, his daughter Lina Sabutienė greets us at the front door. She hospitably asks us into the living room – the same room in which Gorbachev and his wife Raisa sat 23 years ago.

Klusas, who will soon celebrate his 75th birthday, was not told about the scheduled visit until that same morning; soon thereafter the security force was already in the house searching it for possible dangers. “Then I drove together with Gorbachev from the shop to the house in a limousine,” Klusas recalls with a smile. Many people were already crowded into his home, but only the Gorbachevs and their selected company were permitted into the living room, where Klusas’s wife, two daughters and son-in-law already awaited them. The rest had to stay outside.


“Gorbachev sat down, chased the journalists away, placed a bodyguard at the door and said, ‘I’d like to have a rest now.’” Nothing was prepared for the visitors, “because we had been told we didn’t need to prepare anything. He wouldn’t want to eat and we shouldn’t offer him anything.” His daughter Lina served up coffee and sweets for us and the staff from Delfi. But our conversation also lasted far longer; Gorbachev stayed a good 15 minutes and didn’t even take his coat off.

What did they talk about? “Oh, you know…” Klusas cannot really remember; his daughter Lina comes to his aid: “How’s your job? How are you doing? Just such everyday things.” The Gorbachevs also viewed the house. This was routine for the Klusas family, for their model house had often been shown to guests from the socialist bloc who were told that the family lived under very good conditions and had a lot of room.

Raisa and her lost skirt button

Daughter Lina Sabutienė was 20 years old at the time and didn’t think the Gorbachev visit was so special. She had a day off and was therefore at home by chance and simply got caught up in the maelstrom of events. Yet she was not especially interested in it, says Sabutienė today. Only Gorbachev’s wife Raisa caught her eye – she seemed a very beautiful woman to her. She was considerate as well. The “First Lady of the Soviet Union” gave the family daughters chocolates.


Rasa Šiškuvienė, the incumbent town administrator of Bridai, also remembers an incident concerning Raisa Gorbachova. Šiškuvienė had only been the director of the kindergarten for a few days when the high-ranking visitors arrived there. “Raisa took one step forwards and – whoops – she grabbed her stomach. The button of her skirt had torn off!” The entire delegation stood still, a needle and thread were found and the women who were in the kindergarten sewed the button back on. Only then could anything proceed.

Other moments still entice different reactions today, for example as Raisa surprisingly asked the children to sing a song. The teachers were briefly nonplussed, but then all in unison began singing the song “Our dear family has gathered here today,” and all of the children surrounded Raisa Gorbachova. “Afterwards, this game was turned into politics,” recalls Rasa Šiškuvienė. Some people presumed they had intentionally chosen this – in their opinion unsuitable – song. But it was a spontaneous decision, Rasa ensures us, it was the song that the children sang well. It had nothing to do with politics.

“Everything will cost more with freedom,” warned Gorbachev

The visit itself did, however. Algirdas Brazauskas, the then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania was also among Gorbachev’s entourage. “Gorbachev said to him, ‘Algirdas, nothing will be the same. You will all have to pay for everything dearly.’ And that’s how it is today, isn’t it?” says Jonas Klusas, the former tractor driver, adding, “Gorbachev was a good person, really. He gave our cathedral in Vilnius back to us. If he had said only one word against us, the Soviets here would have ruined everything. There would have been far more victims. They would have trodden on the people back then like worms.”

The then director of the kolkhoz Pirmyn! (Forward!), Aloyzas Jocas, also remembers Gorbachev’s warnings of how painful the consequences of the secession would be for Lithuania. Jocas initially hesitated to meet with us. After lengthy negotiations he finally agreed to receive us in his home.


As the boss, he welcomed the guest to his operation. Gorbachev viewed the shop of the kolkhoz – and even entered the sanitary facilities with Jocas. That was not planned and a bodyguard placed himself in his path. “I lightly shoved him aside with my hand. At the time, I had no idea that it wasn’t proper,” Jocas relates with a grin.

Gorbachev also spoke with the workers, the former kolkhoz director remembers. They asked what they would have to expect when Lithuania strived for freedom. The politician explained that separation from the Soviet Union would be harmful. But the conversations were only brief; there was no time to go into things. “There was no tactlessness or harsh statements,” says Jocas. “Gorbachev revealed himself as a simple person – congenial, without causing any agitation.” At least until lunchtime.

The accusations came along with independence

At the lunchtime hour, the guest and his entourage entered the mirrored hall of the health centre, the showpiece and pride of the village. The leader of the Soviet Union brought along his own cooks to Lithuania. The Lithuanians could also cook borscht and roast but the specialists from Moscow observed exactly what ingredients were used.

During lunch, Gorbachev used plain language to reason with the Lithuanians, the witnesses tell us: leaving the Soviet Union would be economically disadvantageous for Lithuania. There were other options for striving for more freedom. He promised to grant Lithuania complete trade freedom and that Lithuanians would be able to organize their economy with more freedoms in future.

“Back then there was a lot of educational propaganda: supposedly in two, three or five years at most after seceding from the Soviet Union, our lives would be at the level of those in Germany. This confused the people; no one could predict reality,” says Aloyzas Jocas, yet immediately adds that he had nothing against free Lithuania. Only that it is hard for him to observe the way the reforms were carried out – a pathway of destruction rather than continuity. “Tears fill my eyes when I walk through Bridai.”


While he is telling us these things, Jocas is interrupted a few times by his wife Zinaida, who is setting the table in the next room with all sorts of delicacies, coffee and brandy. She accuses her husband of talking too much and says that they might get in trouble again because of it. After the political change, because of her husband’s post her family was immediately labelled “evil Communists and kolkhoz folk,” the retired doctor’s assistant reports. For many people, the things they accomplished no longer meant anything. People forgot that Bridai not only had a well functioning kolkhoz, but was also a famous village due to its cultural house, its health centre, one of the loveliest kindergartens in the republic and its internationally award-winning stud farm. And the people forgot that they too, the Jocas family, were for independence and had stood on the Baltic Way.

Jocas lets his wife finish speaking, and then continues: Gorbachev stayed twice as long in Bridai as planned – four rather than two hours. The then First Secretary of the Committee of the City of Šiauliai in the Communist Party of Lithuania, Mindaugas Stakvilevičius, got pretty nervous and kept asking how they should schedule the remaining visit, Jocas recalls. But Gorbachev was busy trying to convince the local party functionaries of the damages of Lithuania’s secession. “Raisa also kept looking at her watch and giving him signals that he should finally end the meeting,” Aloyzas Jocas says with a smile. Then, Gorbachev made short work of it: the schedule was altered. The president of the Soviet Union wanted to rest, so simply did not meet with the city’s party functionaries.

Locked in for security reasons

In spite of all the critical questions from individual workers and inhabitants – there were no courageous calls for liberty in Bridai. All of the witnesses of Gorbachev’s visit that we interviewed admit this. Large crowds gathered on the village streets, not only local village residents, but also many who came from elsewhere.

On archive photos, people with signs are seen, “Let Us Go Our Way,” they say. Yet our interviewees do not recognize the protesters – maybe they came from the nearby city of Šiauliai or from somewhere else to Bridai. It’s said that Gorbachev reacted very coolly. When he saw the people with the protest signs, he simply said, “I’ve seen them already, so I’m not going to speak with them. I came here to see the kolkhoz,” and continued on.

Lina Sabutienė and Rasa Šiškuvienė did not see anything of the protests, nor did they hear any cries or speeches. Their freedom of movement was restricted. The security force had forbidden the family of Jonas Klusas to leave their house. Šiškuvienė even had to stay overnight in the kindergarten. “I was not allowed out for two days; I wasn’t even allowed to call my mother. I was locked into a room; meals were brought to me regularly. Perhaps they thought I might distribute some sort of proclamations.”


Inside the kindergarten, the security people had everything under control: they checked the walls with detectors, searched the bouquets of flowers that the children wanted to present to the guests and connected a listening device to the telephone. Six-foot men with pistols did not let Šiškuvienė, then the director of the kindergarten, out of their sight. “How’s a person supposed to work, to concentrate, in such a situation?” Yet she wasn’t angry at the time. It was just an odd feeling. And in retrospect, it was impressive.

“It’s only a pity I wasn’t able to see everything. I had to stay indoors the entire time and was accompanied everywhere I went like a cripple,” she tells us as we take a stroll through the village together. Šiškuvienė is today Bridai’s town administrator and knows the whole story from those days. Security officers had stood in every corner, she tells us, “even over there in the water tower.” Yet there were no special instructions on how to behave during Gorbachev’s visit or who was permitted to be present and who was not – nothing like that, former kolkhoz director Aloyzas Jocas assures us. Yet everything else in Bridai was controlled ever since the town was founded.




Part 2: Gorbachev’s Visit to Lithuania’s Model Soviet Village