A Lithuanian compares Communism & Capitalism

[Ognir]

http://www.efn.org/~rolanda/discovering/intro.html

Discovering America As It Is

Valdas Anelauskas

Atlanta: Clarity Press, Inc., 1999

{p. 1}  Introduction

My Journey to the Land of Misery & Plutocracy

... There are thousands, perhaps even millions of naive people around the world who still dream about coming to live in America. It remains the destination of choice for those who wish to emigrate from their own countries. America is still like a mysterious enchantress to many. This is one of the main reasons why I have written this book. I want to tell the truth to others who, like myself ten years ago, are either ill-informed and know next to nothing about this country, or whose knowledge is distorted by propaganda. + + +

{p. 2} Both my original positive views on America and on capitalism as well as the subsequent evolution of my world outlook, had their roots in my experiences in my native Lithuania. I grew up opposed to the Soviet communist regime that ruled my homeland. The slogan "question authority" well describes my attitude toward all that I usually refer to as "the System" -- any system. As a result, when I came to the United States, I still maintained a relatively skeptical attitude toward everything I saw here or was told. I wanted to find out for myself before coming to a final conclusion. My increasing alienation from the American system was not the disillusionment of someone whose personal plans and ambitions have gone awry; rather, it resulted from my intellectual predisposition to probe and test the generally accepted (and officially endorsed) version of reality, to see to what extent it accorded with truth. I have always preferred to see with my own eyes, and to think with my own brain.

The Soviet Union also had its own conventional view (maybe it would be better to say "official view") of the world according to which, for example, the Red Army "liberated" Lithuania ... Liberated us from what? While the Soviets may well have viewed themselves as liberating the Lithuanian peasants and working class from their domination by landlords and capitalists, from the perspective of Lithuanians, who rightly felt their historic national identity to have paramount meaning and value, such "liberation" coincided with simply eliminating our country from the map of the world.

To be honest, perhaps I wouldn't have had much against even that Soviet-style mock-communism if it hadn't been forced upon us, but freely chosen by our nation from multiple choices within our independent Lithuanian state -- in other words, through democratic free elections. But the Soviets forced their communist system upon us with terribly brutal violence. More than 100,000 people from Lithuania (including many of my relatives) were deported to Siberia and thousands died or were killed there. This is how we were introduced to communism.

Perhaps I might use the analogy of rape: even if the process did not destroy the body, it was repugnant and abhorrent to the spirit. Even if the communist system itself could be presumed not to have brought about socio-economic harm for most people, in spiritual terms, it was nonetheless the rape of a whole nation. ...

So, this is the most important reason why an absolute majority of Lithuanians weren't satisfied with the imposition of Soviet communism. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed because it was like a prison of nations. Even many Russians felt that way. The huge Soviet empire had been created artificially and by brutal force, much of it from before rise of communism. ...

{p. 3} The Lithuanian people have very deep nationalistic feelings, just as do all the ancient homogeneous nations in other European countries and elsewhere. Our ethnic identity is a very important part of our mentality and way of life. We are not into multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism, when it is incorrectly defined as losing one's own culture to become assimilated into some supposedly universal culture -- which usually in reality is the culture of the largest or dominating component. Russian communists tried to turn us into a "Soviet people" with no national feelings or attachments.

Ironically, the Soviets may have thought that national identity had little lasting meaning for people, and could be eradicated without much pain, given equal and more or less fair socio-economic situations. The late twentieth century has certainly proved how mistaken that view is. Yet was this not the supposition on which America was built -- the multicultural "melting pot?" The American melting pot is different from the Soviet one, however. It's not accomplished by brute force. They don't force anyone here to jump into this pot and melt in it. The people who do that do so because most of them deliberately want to melt and become Americans. I mean new immigrants, of course, and not the Native or African Americans, who never had the choice and have always struggled to retain their ethnic identity in America.

What was going on in Lithuania was a legitimate nationalist struggle. Everybody in Lithuania (except perhaps only small Russian and Polish minorities) wanted to remain Lithuanian and dreamed that Lithuania would become an independent country again. Before 1918, Lithuania had been ruled by the Russian czar for over 120 years. Descended from a tribe of defiantly independent Aryan knights, Lithuanians had hated and fought against Russian domination then -- and did so again when the "new" communist Russia invaded us, sweeping us under the red flag. ...

While my family -- the Anelauskas family -- had been wealthy landowners during the short period between two World Wars when Lithuania was independent, my own early predisposition against the Soviet regime in Lithuania had nothing to do with the fact that my grandparents were wealthy or that my parents weren't collaborationists, but rather reflected a feeling of anger and resentment at the Russian conquest common among all Lithuanians. Our family retained an historic hatred of Russian imperialism, so in some senses it was hardly surprising that it should be directed as well at its modern version of enforced communism. After the Soviet Red Army occupied Lithuania again in 1940, my grandparents !ost all their property. Worse, the

{p. 4} Soviets deported them to Siberia as "enemies of the people." My father fought in the guerrilla resistance against the Russian invaders. When he was captured, the KGB special tribunal, the so-called "troika," sentenced him to death. While on death row, his sentence was suddenly changed to twenty-five years in the Siberian GULag. He spent nearly ten years -- more than the famous Solzhenitsyn -- in various prison camps in Russia's far North. Only in 1959, after Nikita Khruschev granted amnesty to most political prisoners, did he return home to Lithuarlia. I was born the next year.

I think my father's spirit was cowed during that lost decade during which he was incarcerated and under threat of death. Evideny, those ten years of torment he endured in the Soviet GULag were enough for him. He didn't want to drop salt on a bleeding wound. He wanted to live a quiet, low-profile life, and he also wanted me, his son, to have a quiet life and not to get in trouble because of political activism. This is why my father never encouraged me in any way to become a rebel against the existing state of affairs. While my parents never acquiesced to what happened to our county, they also never expressed their discontent openly. They kept it inside, hoping to prevent me or my sister from being inspired by their negative opinions. After returning home from Siberia, my father refused to take any further part in the resistance movement, preferring instead to pursue a quiet career as a scientist. He went along, more or less, as did the majority of mainstream Lithuanians at that time. But he never joined the Communist Party, nor did he pursue any kind of opportunistic career within the Soviet "nomenclatura." ...

Despite general resentment among Lithuanians to foreign domination, there were certain benefits to conformity. Economic hardship wasn't a major feature of the post-war Soviet communist system. The most important and worst thing for our family (just as for most Lithuanians) was that our beloved motherland wasn't an independent state and that it was occupied and controlled by a foreign power. It was a moral issue. I could, of course, say that it was a political issue, but this would eliminate the true depth of the

{p. 5} feeling. I use the word "moral" because it means something bigger, something beyond politics. It would be similar to calling slavery a political issue. One feels morally humiliated by being enslaved, by being oppressed, victimized. There were many people who were more or less satisfied with the economic situation or even the political situation in occupied Lithuania, but none, even Lithuanian communists and collaborationists, could escape the feeling of moral humiliation.

In addition to moral abasement of our nation, there was a certain lack of political and economic freedom as well. People weren't allowed to do many things -- to read dissident literature, for example -- though admittedly the majority of Lithuanians simply weren't much interested in doing those forbidden things. As in America, most people did not go out of their way to read dissident literature. Most, no doubt, were primarily interested in how to buy a new car or furniture, how to be promoted on their job, or in spending their summer vacation on the beautiful beaches of the Baltic Sea. They were simple people immersed in a simple life's cares; they preferred a simple life's pleasures. They kept their mouths shut and weren't looking for trouble. So, for them, the lack of freedom to read what you wanted -- or even to say what you wanted -- wasn't a major inconvenience at all. Such people, who perhaps make up the silent majority in any society, aren't much concerned about freedom of speech or the press, or to what extent the official party line interfered with one's understanding of life in part or as a whole. As they had neither personal sophistication, nor were compelled by a spirit of intellectual inquiry, some of the Soviet regime's more crude understandings of the arts and social sciences were barely discernible, let alone distasteful to them.

In Lithuania, as in the Soviet Union in general, there were many more people who were concemed and unhappy about restrictions on traveling abroad, for example, than about forbidden books or political discussions. Soviet citizens were deprived of the freedom to travel abroad where they wanted and when they wanted - especially to Western capitalist countries. And nobody, except Jews, was allowed to emigrate from the USSR. But, as I think now, for the majority of people in the Soviet Union, this also wasn't a very annoying limitation, because many people, I believe, were fairly satisfied with the possibilities of travel afforded inside the USSR. It was a huge empire, after all. Now, after its collapse, everyone is permitted to travel abroad as much as they might wish, but only a very few can afford to do that. Indeed, what use is such freedom if you cannot afford to take advantage of it? Now most people can't even afford to travel within Russia or to spend their summer vacations on those same beaches of the Baltic Sea the way, twenty years ago, virtually everyone could.

I could perhaps list here many prohibitions in the former Soviet Union that were very annoying to me personally at that time, but as I see it now, most of those things were very relative. For example, boys weren't allowed to have long hair while in school. At the time -- the 1970s -- I wasn't happy about it, because we all wanted to copy American hippies. However today I can clearly see that it was rather a very good policy that we weren't allowed to look like all these punks look, here. A cultural behavior that is adopted for the

{p. 6} purpose of outraging the others seems to me to have little grounding in true value, nor is it defensible on the lines of historic ethnic practice. I see no violation of human rights at all if people are not allowed to chew and spit gum -- as they are not in Singapore -- or make tattoos on their foreheads or to have hair dyed in all colors of rainbow or wear metal rings in their noses. Many such things that were forbidden in the former Soviet Union, as I see it now, weren't human rights, but simply some unnecessary excesses -- over-indulgences -- that could be harmful either to the person concerned or even to the entire society. Moreover, in my opinion, most people - in any society, under any system—aren't interested in such things and simply don't care whether it is forbidden or allowed.

What was, for many, more serious than these, was the fact that there was also no economic freedom for those who wanted to live "like in America." People who wanted to satisfy their greed by owning more than they actually needed were restrained by the communist state. Soviet citizens weren't permitted to make money off the labor of others. In the Soviet Union, all the economic activities were limited to enterprises under total state control. All employees, including bosses, were regarded as working for the "workers' state" and were also paid by that state. Though big industrial enterprises were formally considered as publicly-owned, they still were under strict government control. There weren't any small private businesses allowed at all. Therefore, no individual could take advantage of other people's work; no one could exploit others. While the Soviet state itself did exploit working people, it assuredly didn't do so to the same extreme extent as people here, in the so- called "free market" system, are exploited by private capitalists. As a result, there wasn't such inequality in the USSR; there simply weren't favorable conditions for anyone to accumulate considerably more wealth than others. The appearance of undue wealth would only create suspicions in others and, of course, primarily in the authorities.

Some professionals, scientists, famous authors or entertainers did have considerably more wealth than the majority of Soviet citizens, but nobody objected to that because these people weren't exploiting others. They simply were exceptionally talented. Of course, even the wealthiest Soviet citizens weren't as distant from the majority of the population asAmerican millionaires or billionaires are. The upper stratum of Soviet "nomenclatura," Communist Party bosses, too, had considerable wealth, but nothing to even compare to that of the American ruling class. There were also many people in the Soviet Union who were simply stealing various things from enterprises they worked in and profiteering from it. This wasn't a very risky business, so many took advantage. There were also all kinds of speculators buying things cheaper and re-selling for profit. Many ended in jail. Personally, I don't think that such people were victims of an unjust and oppressive Soviet system. They rather were victims of their own greed. On the other hand, for those ordinary folks who preferred to live modestly, the Soviet system wasn't so bad. Most people had enough to satisfy all their basic needs.

The Soviets weren't so straightforward with freedom of religion. No religion was directly forbidden in the USSR, but they all were kept in low

{p. 7} profile. The official Soviet ideology promoted atheism. There was a certain lack of religious rights and there was some religious discrimination in the Soviet Union -- though possibly less than is thought by westerners. For example, if somebody wanted to hold an ideologically important or as it was usually called "ideologically sensitive" job and be active in the church at the same time, it wasn't possible. In such an instance, one had to choose between one's job and the church. Some of the clergymen who were "too zealous" in promoting religion were persecuted by the KGB, too. I don't think there was much difference between the treatment of the Roman Catholic Church and Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. In Lithuania, we still had functioning and open catholic churches in every town, even the smallest towns, and everybody could attend them. I think that the communists had closed or destroyed more churches in Russia than they did in Lithuania for in Russia, there were many large cities that had no church at all.

Everybody knew that many high-level Russian Orthodox priests and bishops were collaborating with the KGB. Damaged from inside, the Russian Orthodox Church was becoming somewhat impotent and losing its influence among the common people in Russia. In Lithuania, this wasn't the case. Many Catholic priests were very much involved in resistance to Soviet rule and the Catholic Church had an enormous influence among Lithuanians. It was true that the Jewish religion was persecuted by the Soviet atheist authorities. The same was true with some protestant religious minorities such as, for example, the Jehovah Witnesses or Pentecostals. Many members of these sects were sent to prison camps for their religious activities. Hare Krishnas also were very harshly persecuted in the former Soviet Union.

On the other hand, after having spent quite a few days in American libraries reading the New York Times and other papers from the 1970s and 1980s, I know what the American media were telling Americans and other westerners about us -- that millions of people in the Soviet Union were suffering a great deal without being able to speak their minds freely or read forbidden books, and that even more allegedly wanted to leave the USSR and move to America. This was a wholesale exaggeration. How many people in the Soviet Union were interested in reading forbidden books, such as Hitler's Mein Kampf, for example, or maybe wanted to join the Hare Krishnas or Pentecostals? How many ordinary Soviet citizens at that time dreamt about moving to Brooklyn, New York? Today I can say without any doubt that fewer than American propaganda wanted to convince us, there in the Soviet Union, and to fool people into believing, here in America. There were so few people who were really concerned about the lack of these rights and freedoms that nobody would even have noticed them without activists like myself, who were working hard to find them and publicizethem internationally.

Yes, the Soviet Union was a totalitarian, not a democratic country, and people didn't have many civil or political rights there, but it certainly wasn't as important to the majority of people as all those social and economic rights that they had and took for granted. I also think that the majority of people in

{p. 8} the Soviet Union were sufficiently satisfied with the books, music and movies that were available to them, and with the churches that they could attend, and the places they could travel to. If you ask any Russian or Lithuanian to name American authors and their books that he or she had read, you would hear at least ten times more names and titles than if you asked any American to name Russian or Lithuanian authors and books. (I have tried this experiment many times.)

What did such westem newspapers say conceming the number of people in the former Soviet Union who were satisfied with the right to have a decent job and keep that job without employers having the right to fire you at any moment for nothing? What did they say about the number of people interested in the right to get as much education (excellent education!) as they wanted without having to pay for it, the number concerned with having the right to get medical help for free and with no limitations and so on? Millions, many millions ... How could I have imagined, as a dissident, that all this could have been put in jeopardy by our activities?

The Voice of America wasn't talking to us about these invaluable fundamental rights. No, they were hypnotizing people by telling them about their "inalienable right" to emigrate from the USSR and come to New York where ... dollars grow on evergreen "dollar trees" right in the middle of shining Broadway. . . With naked Playboy girls dancing around and singing "America the Beautiful." This may sound like a joke, but all kinds of such nonsense really was broadcast sometimes by the Voice of America or Radio Liberty when they were talking about our violated rights and how we couldn't see "America the Beautiful" for ourselves because of the despotic Soviet regime holding us trapped in the country as if we were in prison ...

I did not become a dissident because I was categorically opposed to communist ideology, their economics or even the obvious lack of civil liberties or freedom of religion. Since our family wasn't religious, we had no quarrels over religious freedom to pick with the government. Rather, my primary motivation was to do as much as I could to take part in a movement toward liberating our nation from being basically a colony of Russia. The incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR by armed force raised -- in addition to the moral offense mentioned earlier -- questions of our civil and political (democratic) rights to manage our own affairs. It raised questions in relation to those freedoms so often advocated by America, and well represented in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the international human rights treaty with which the U.S. has the greatest affinity.

Like many of my compatriots, I became involved in the resistance movement early in my teens. Actually, I was first arrested by the KGB in 1974 when I was only fourteen years old for committing "high treason" by putting flowers on the grave of the Lithuanian national martyr, Romas Kalanta, who had immolated himself in protest against the Soviet regime in 1972. From an early age, I defied the authority forced upon my country from Moscow. It wasn't economic dissatisfaction (my parents had enough of everything: good house, car, money for vacation on the beach) or lack of some specific political rights or freedoms. What freedoms can be so important to a twelve-year-old

{p. 9} kid? It was rather a kind of ever-present internal feeling that something is wrong, that even the air is saturated with oppression. As an instance: kids are always interested in soldiers, but we knew that those soldiers that we saw on the street in our town weren't our Lithuanian soldiers. They were foreign soldiers, they spoke a foreign language (at the age of ten or twelve we couldn't understand much Russian yet).

When you grow up in such an environment, all those little things add up. Why is there a huge portrait of Lenin on the wall, why are we expected to glorify a Russian, why are those songs on the radio in Russian, why ... ? All these things that you encounter in daily life even as a kid make you think. And, of course, there was always the strong influence of one's parents (and especially grandparents) as well as other relatives. Eventually, it informs the children's mindset -- in most families, not only mine. While, my parents never encouraged me to resist existing reality, they rarely explained our situation to me without hiding or failing to mention something. I therefore naturally concluded that we didn't live in a normal country. To make the situation a little more understandable to a western reader, perhaps I might say that our relation to the ethnic Russians sent to Lithuania as emigre-occupiers by the Soviet Union bears some similarity to how indigenous people may have felt at the onslaught of the European settlers.

Little by little, resistance to oppression and non-conformism became a way of life. I became a rebel. While in school, I flatly refused to join any official communist youth organizations. Soon after my first arrest, I joined the underground patriotic youth circle. We challenged the Soviet regime with the same methods used by rebellious teenagers everywhere: graffiti on walls ("Russians Out of Lithuania!"), breaking the windows of some local Communist Party bureaucrat in the middle of a cold winter's night, superimposing pomographic images on Brezhnev's portraits in civic institutions, and such like.

At the age of eighteen, I refused to serve in the Soviet military, and to take part in the Afghanistan war. I was arrested immediately and locked up in a psycho ward. It appeared to be the rule at that time: if you didn't want to become a soldier in the "glorious" Red Army, they truly believed you had to be crazy. However, after a few months, they let me go, and never bothered me again with military service.

I then studied applied arts and writing for some time. However, it was quite difficult for a rebellious non-conformist like me to achieve an advanced level of education in the Soviet Union without compromising one's integrity or adopting what the authorities considered to be the correct consciousness. This was especially true for fields such as joumalism or any other "ideologically sensitive" profession. So I had to constantly struggle to keep a balance between my personal consciousness and the official line of thinking.

At the same time, my involvement within the Lithuanian national liberation movement deepened. In the process, I experienced increasingly serious disagreements with some other Lithuanian dissidents. The major point of contention was religion. Most Lithuanian underground groups in the 1970s and early 1980s were led and financed by the Roman Catholic Church -- hardly

{p. 10} surprising, perhaps, given that at least ninety percent of the Lithuanian population consider themselves Catholic. Many underground dissidents at that time were Catholic priests, monks and nuns. It was natural therefore, that the most important human right and liberty for them was freedom of worship, or more precisely (as they did not agitate much for the religious freedoms of Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, etc.) freedom for the Catholic religion. They may have hated Hare Krishnas no less than they hated Brezhnev's regime and Russian Red Army.

While I wasn't seriously practicing any religion myself, I was always intrigued by the Eastern philosophies. The exotic spirituality of Hinduism and Buddhism fascinated me much more than the orthodoxy of Catholic Christianity. Therefore, the efforts of the Roman Catholic priests and nuns to dominate the Lithuanian struggle made me feel uneasy. To me, they represented another oppression, and this made communications between us often quite difficult.

My alliances became shaky and problematic. I quarreled with my fellow human rights dissidents when they concentrated solely on religious rights, which ohen tumed out to mean rights for Catholics only. Sometimes our interactions became belligerent. Once I became very angry when some of my fellow dissidents tried to convince me of the importance of prioritizing freedom of religion in a formal letter of protest that we were composing. They wanted to put religious rights as the most important thing that the oppressed Lithuanian nation wanted from Russia, over and above national freedom. As a Lithuanian nationalist, I was flabbergasted. I recall voicing my acquiescence to this with the sarcastic remark, "OK, but: only under the condition that you make sexual freedom the next most important right for oppressed Lithuanians ... " They instantly shunned me as a heretic.

Rather than chastened, I broke free from the constraints of Catholic domination and increased my dissident activities. I journeyed across the Soviet Union to acquaint myself with fellow activists from other nations, thereby expanding my horizons to include the great variety of peoples that inhabit the former Soviet Union. I began to place the struggle for the liberation of my Lithuania in the context of the deliverance of all the other countries which had also been subsumed within the Russian-dominated Soviet empire.

This truly international movement strove to overthrow the communist regime in favor of one built on notions of real democracy and human rights. It was neither pro-capitalist nor anti-capitalist; it was rather nationalist and to a large extent, basically libertarian. First of all we wanted to throw off oppression coming from Russia. Since it was communist at that time and had imposed its communism on us as well, we wanted to get rid of their communism regime, too. And after that ... well different people had different ideas about what should come after ... Some dissidents may have imagined the future of their countries as social democracy; others maybe wanted pure capitalism just like in America, and perhaps others wanted something absolutely new and unique. There were anarchists, monarchists, libertarians —all kinds of visions were floated. Even in Russia itself, there were many different trends within their national dissident movement.

{p. 11} I made many friends in Moscow, Leningrad, Tallinn, Kiev, Yerevan, and other places in the USSR, mainly among young pacifists, philosophers, non-conformist artists, writers, underground rock musicians, and so on. Amazingly, they managed to organize summer camps in various places, mostly in the Baltic republics, that each year attracted hundreds of participants from around the Soviet Union. Our campswere sort of like those "Rainbow gatherings" here in the USA, only perhaps less colorful and more oriented toward social activism than passive hedonism.

Such gatherings were only possible because people made them possible through very clever organizing efforts. There wasn't the right in the USSR to form associations of any kind without permission from the government. The KGB harshly persecuted all the illegal—underground—groups. These unsanctioned meetings were absolutely illegal under Soviet law and many people (including myself) were persecuted by the KGB for organizing such youth camps. A few times, camps were even attacked by interior military troops (similar to the National Guard here in the United States). Nevertheless, people from different parts of the USSR kept coming to share their experiences with each other and learn how to resist the oppressive Soviet communist system in nonviolent ways. While a fair amount of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll was also present (hippie ideas arrived to the USSR about ten years late), such things definitely weren't predominant features of youth underground counterculture in the Soviet Union of 1970s and 1980s. The alternative youth movements were more of an intellectual rebellion against all the official restrictions. Again, as mentioned earlier, for different people, there were different reasons to rebel.

In July of 1978, there were plans to hold a big concert in Leningrad near the famous Hermitage art museum. Well-known rock musicians were coming from Europe and even the United States. As far as I can remember, Joan Baez and Carlos Santana were expected, among other American rock music performers. When it became obvious that such a concert could easily be turned into a political action, it was imprudently canceled by the Leningrad authorities just a few hours before opening. It's hard to understand how they could be so oblivious to the likely results of such an action, yet it was this kind of rigidity which continually occurred, leading eventually to the collapse of the system. Frankly speaking, their behavior was stupid. Thousands of people had already gathered on the Winter Palace Plaza. As soon as the concert was canceled, the crowd transformed into one huge protest demonstration, probably the largest spontaneous mass demonstration on that Plaza since the 1917 October Revolution. Hundreds of arrests were made, but most of those arrested were released after only a few hours, because there simply wasn't enough space in the jails for them. The police roughed me up a bit, but not too badly. I still remember this event as one of the most exciting moments in my life. I met hundreds of people there, many of whom I became associated with in the dissident movement.

Gradually I became increasingly involved with various underground publications in the famous "samizdat" networks, and I wrote for them on a regular basis until 1989 when I had to leave the Soviet Union. There wasn't such a right in the USSR as freedom of the press—individuals were not allowed

{p. 12} to start publishing their own newspapers or magazines and all the official publications were censored by the government's special agency called Glavlit. Those who wanted to publish something and avoid censorship had to do it illegally. This is what "samizdat"—which in Russian means self-publishing —was all about. Soviet dissidents were taking a huge risk by doing that.

The best known "samizdat" publication at that time was a weekly news magazine, Express-Chronzcle. I was their reporter in Lithuariia for quite a long time. This magazine publicized as much information as we could access about all human rights violations in the USSR. This might concern the arrest of some well-known dissident by the KGB or just a complaint of some religious group about too much interference from local authorities. During the week, we collected information about such incidents from various sources. It was put together in Moscow on Saturday, and every Sunday, our Chronicle was distributed among foreign reporters and diplomatic personnel in Moscow. Another such network was the Daily Glasnost which emerged in the late 1980s. At that time, there were already fax-machines and even computers available, so it was possible to publish short bulletins every day and transmit them immediately to other countries.

I wrote about a great variety of things at that time: political prisoners, persecution of young people who refused to serve in the Soviet Army, suppression of all kinds of alternative and counterculture groups, such as underground artists or rock bands, repression against non-mainstream religious groups, such as the Hare Krishnas, and so on. Also, I frequently wrote about the forced use of psychiatry in political persecution, because Express-Chronicle always focussed a great deal on the issue of Soviet punitive use of psychiatry and especially on its use by the KGB in the persecution of free-thinkers.

After Gorbachev introduced "glasnost" and "perestroika" in the USSR, a few of my critical articles even appeared in official Soviet publications such as Literatzlrnaya Gazeta, which was a newspaper for the Russian intellectuals or "intelligentsia." Perhaps the most important among those of my articles that made it to the official Soviet press was one about forbidden writers and their books that for very long time weren't allowed to be published in the Soviet Union. This article appeared in the newspaper, Knizhnoe Obozrenie, which was like a special newspaper for the Soviet book-publishing industry.

Later I became the first reporter in Lithuania to "come out of the closet" and work openly for Radio Liberty/ Free Europe run by the CIA—the first to use my real name to sign all of my reports. That meant that I had to say, after each report on the radio who was reporting and from where. While there were many people before me who were gathering information in Lithuania for Radio Liberty, they did it under conditions of anonymity, being reporte}s in the underground. I made most of my contacts with representatives of the foreign media based in Moscow and also with all those various radio stations abroad that were broadcasting to the Soviet Union (not only Radio Liberty, but also the British BBC, Vatican Radio, and others) mainly through my connections among dissidents in Moscow, specifically through people from

{p. 13} Daily Glasnost and Express-Chronicle. I also formed connections with foreign —mostly American—journalists accredited in Moscow. I collaborated with Associated Press and news agencies from other countries.

The only remuneration for such activities one could expect (especially before Gorbachev's "perestroika") could be five or so years in prison camps for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." The whole "samizdat" was run entirely by idealistic volunteers, and if we even wanted to buy a paper, we usually had to pay for it out of our own pockets. Later on, after "perestroika" had already started and when there were more and more connections with foreigners (diplomats and reporters) in Moscow, I think then, there were some financial contributions from abroad that enabled things to get done more easily. No doubt, at least part of such funds originated from the American CIA, but I don't think that there was a lot of money coming from that source. It is my belief that most of the money that the CIA directed towards the needs of the Soviet dissident movement sank into the deep pockets of our "liberators" sitting in comfortable offices in Washington, D.C. or New York, and that quite a few people here in America got considerably richer because of that money.

Most of the financial means used by the Lithuanian liberation movement came from the Catholic Church. Also there were substantial contributions that came from Lithuanians living in the USA, Canada, Australia and other countries. People here simply collected this money in churches, garage sales and special fundraisings. All such funds went to financing our publishing and organizational activities, not to paying people for what they were doing or writing. Sometimes I was reimbursed for my train tickets from Vilnius to Moscow or long-distance phone calls, but this was only a very small part of my expenditures. Usually they were paid from my own pocket—or my dear wife's pocket, to be more exact, because only she worked to earn a living—or from my friends, also poor dissidents. I must emphasize that no one became rich because of his or her dissident activities in the former Soviet Union. To my knowledge, most former dissidents who are still living now in Lithuania or other ex-Soviet countries are even poorer today than they were twenty or ten years ago. Former KGB agents are much better off there these daysthan former freedom fighters.

My reports appeared from time to time in newspapers like the New York Times and the Times of London. They especially appreciated reports of ruthless human rights abuse, state terror and atrocities, anything that could embarrass the Soviets. They used my information for their own news stories. I knew what the Western media wanted from me and I provided as much as I could. There were many things that the Soviets wanted to hide from the rest of the world. In the heat of my anti-Soviet sentiments, I was happy to comply. There wasn't any pressure or orders from anywhere; I simply wanted to do anything it took to make the Soviets feel bad. That system was my enemy, I hated it and so, naturajlly, I did as much as possible to damage it.

In the Soviet system, it wasn't easy to collect negative information. One couldn't find negative facts in the local newspaper. Everything was censored. Many things were kept in secret. We all knew that there were a lot of bad things going on, but how to get more or less objective information about it

{p. 14} was difficult. If so many things are hidden and kept secret, one automatically becomes suspicious that there are probably a lot of reasons for the secrecy.

It wasn't an easy task, for example, to estimate how many political prisoners there were in the Soviet Union at any given time. There were special camps in Siberia exclusively for such prisoners and it was relatively simple to count people locked up in such places (it could be done by someone among the prisoners), but there were also many more political prisoners that were locked up in camps and prisons for common criminals. Some less-known dissidents could spend ten or more years alone in such places among thieves, rapists and murderers, and nobody would ever find out about such prisoners.

If, for example, there were one hundred political prisoners in some particular Siberian camp and I knew that for sure because a friend of mine had just returned home after spending five years there, I estimated that in each similar camp, there should be at least about the same number of political prisoners as well. So, if I needed to provide information about those prison camps, I would say that there were at least one hundred political prisoners in each camp. There were many prison camps throughout the Soviet empire, and we reported that there were thousands of people locked up in them for political reasons. But who, except the KGB, could tell the hundred percent reliable truth as to how many political prisoners were there in reality? I think that there always were at least a couple of thousand political prisoners in the USSR. It's next to impossible to be hundred percent accurate when writing about such things.

I wanted to do everything in my power to damage the Soviets. I felt that if this kind of slightly-embellished information helped us to free even one of those prisoners, then it was well worth the effort. I have no regrets whatsoever. Even if some of our reports were embellished a little bit, there were so many uncounted, unknown and forgotten prisoners that I think even with such an occasional inaccuracy, we couldn't exaggerate the numbers too much. If those reports (underestimated or overestimated—it doesn't matter) could help to free prisoners of consciousness it was very important and well worth doing. Quite often freeing such political prisoners was the same as saving them from certain death. In actuality, those reports did help quute a few people to get out of prison camps, and I would definitely do the same thing again if I had to.

And so again, as it concerned protest demonstrations, if there was some demonstration against Soviet occupation of Lithuania, for example, and there were about 50,000 people participating (as always, a very approximate count), the reports usually said that there were "at least" 50,000 and "up to" sixty or seventy or maybe even hundred thousand participants. If there was at least one person beaten up by police, I would say that there had been victims of police brutality. In our holy war against Soviet Union, information was our weapon.

Indeed, information has always been a weapon on one side or another. For dissidents, usually impoverished, engaged in a struggle against nearly overwhelming odds, and aware that extensive abuses are going on, even if they lack the facilities to document them, such a tendency is perhaps understandable. More problematic, however, is the fact that this tendency, in

{p. 15} turn, can be exploited by other governments—which may be no better as far as human rights are concerned, or even worse—for ends which are not so pure. Also, while dissidents may be able to grasp immediate instances of human rights abuses, they may have greater difficulty in placing the events they witness within the global picture, and the relativity of its evils.

And then, indeed, there are those dissidents who are reacting purely from motives of revenge, or the desire to regain lost privileges. After coming to the United States, I had a lot of business in the circles of immigrants coming from many oppressed nations (including Cubans). For example, at that time I had pretty good contacts with one Cuban who had spent twenty or more years in prison in Cuba for his political activities. He felt he had a pretty good reason for hating Castro just because of that, and would have said anything whatsoever to embarrass the Castro government. And I know that similar behavior is encouraged and agreed to by other dissidents from Cuba and elsewhere whose protests parallel the policy preferences of the United States. It remains a truism of "realpolitik" that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

In mid-1980s, I joined the Liberation League of Lithuania (LLL), the major force in the Lithuanian drive for independence before the emergence of the popular movement, Sajudis. Soon after it appeared, Sajudis attracted a mass following and effectively took over from the underground League. The vanguard LLL was a more militant organization of former political prisoners and younger generation radicals. The ground we turned was utilized by distinguished intellectuals, celebrated writers, prestigious professors, and popular people in the mainstream to bring Sajudis to the forefront of the growing mass struggle for Lithuanian independence.

Needless to say, I was an active participant from the very beginning in the famous Singing Revolution that eventually led to restoration of Lithuania's independence. With my connections among dissidents and activists in other parts of the Soviet Union, I often acted as a sort of middle-person between the Lithuanian movement and other reform movements in the USSR. By that time, I myself was no longer directly involved much in street actions or demonstrations because I had to concentrate mainly on my propaganda work. I reported on these actions behind the Iron Curtain to the Western media and to various intemational organizations, actions such as, for example, the hunger strike that was started in summer of 1988 by two of my friends, both well- known Lithuanian dissidents, reported by my article published in the Russian-language anti-Soviet newspaper, Russkaya Mysl, in Paris, or the huge protest demonstration that took place on September 28,1988, where Soviet police attacked people using tear gas, and later arrested all the participants of the hunger strike at night.

In 1988, I was among the founders of the Lithuanian branch of the Intemational Society for Human Rights (ISHR) which monitored and recorded violations of human rights by the Soviet authorities. This was a fairly right- wing oriented and definitely very pro-American organization headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. The Lithuanian branch of the ISHR had an office in a private apartment located in downtown Vilnius that was under 2hour

{p. 16} surveillance by the KGB. At that time, I usually went about with two KGB "bodyguards" following me everywhere. Even my wife had KGB "boyfriends" sitting on a bench outside her workplace.

As pro-democracy forces grew in the USSR, so too grew the pressure from the KGB and the Soviet authorities in Moscow and in Lithuania to convince me and other activists that our best option would be to leave the country. Some "soft threats" were dropped, such as: "Bad things could happen, my friend—unfortunate incidents, tragic accidents, regrettable food contamination maybe ... " It made me aware that the rarnifications of my actions could indeed be serious. In my twenty-eight years, I had never journeyed anywhere outside the Soviet Union before. The idea of travel abroad was admittedly tempting. Why not go and see the world, I thought quite reasonably, instead of getting hit by a car or poisoned at some crappy fast- food joint?

Pressure intensified, particularly after I renounced my Soviet citizenship in December of 1988 on the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as an act of protest against the continued occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union. I put the renunciation in a personal letter to Gorbachev and delivered it by hand to the Kremlin myself. At first, they didn't want to accept it. I said I would remain there and start a hunger strike right in the building of the Supreme Soviet. They capitulated.

After that, the KGB came down on me harder. In Vilnius, they openly warned me to leave the USSR. They threatened that if I refused to depart of my own accord within a few months, they would arrest me, transport me to some African country and leave me there. They actually did carry out this threat against one wellknown Armenian dissident. They arrested him, put him onto an airplane between two KGB guards, delivered him toAddis Abbaba and left him there alone in the airport. Of course, he simply went to the U.S. embassy in Addis Abbaba and received political asylum here.

After long discussions with my friends and consultations with relatives, I and my dear wife finally agreed to follow KGB orders and leave. When the time to leave came, I was filled with indecision and uncertainty. Not the least among my many problems was the decision as to where to go. Our first destination was Vienna not that we had any choice.

The only category of people who were allowed (more or less) to emigrate from the Soviet Union were Jews, for whom there still remained considerable restrictions. For Lithuanians or Russians, there weren't any legal chances at all if they wanted to leave the USSR for good. The Soviet authorities and the KGB wanted to make it clear for all Soviet citizens that only Jews could leave the country. There was a kind of semi-officially endorsed notion that "we have to get rid of those suspicious and untrustworthy Jews." Therefore, if it should occur that a dissident was kicked out from the Soviet Union for his or her activities, they were usually presented to the public (often even in the media) as "Jews," or at least as having some "secret connections" to Israel. This is why all immigrants and exiles had to leave the USSR with papers indicating their destination as Tel-Aviv. I met quite a few Pentecostal Christians

{p. 17} from the Ukraine who were kicked out of the Soviet Union for their religious activities with papers stating that they were Jews.

These were the kind of papers the Soviet authorities gave to us, despite the fact that neither my wife nor I had any Jewish relative in our families for at least the last ten generations. There was a special route through which Soviet immigrants and exiles had to leave the country (unless they were delivered to Addis Abbaba like my Armenian friend) and it was through Vienna. All those organizations that were helping people to settle in Israel (for those who really were Jews) or apply for asylum in the United States or sometimes also in other countries, too, were located in Vienna. Those organizations also provided some financial support by buying tickets, paying for hotels, etc. But it was our responsibility to reach Vienna first. I don't think that it was at all possible to go to Stockholm, for example, or to some place other than Vienna. The only route out of the USSR was through Vienna because we simply weren't allowed to buy a ticket to any other place and likely couldn't expect any special help or financial assistance elsewhere.

When we boarded the train to Vienna, about fifty friends and relatives showed up to bid us farewell—and around a hundred KGB agents swarmed all over the station. I guess they were afraid that we might change our minds and stay ...

We lived in Western Europe as new exiles for a while. We actually wanted to stay and settle somewhere in Europe, but had few choicesbecause we lacked the financial means to settle down where we pleased. After we had spent time in Austria and Italy, we had to move to America. Everything was arranged by the Tolstoy Foundation—the humanitarian organization that we resorted to for help in Vienna—solely because we agreed to apply for political asylum in the United States. We wouldn't have been able to survive on our own without financial assistance from them. Officials from the Tolstoy Foundation persuaded us to move to the United States as high profile political refugees. I will always remember how somebody from the Tolstoy Foundation's staff in Vienna put it: I had the "choice" between spending the night on a park bench or going to America. . .

There is a very good saying in Lithuania that before cutting one should always measure ten times and only after that, make a final cut ... We could have said to that woman from the Tolstoy Foundation in Vienna, "No, we don't agree to go to the United States." We could have gone to some park and sat on a bench all night and thought everything over and over ten times— after al1 it's not as dangerous to stay out on a park bench in Vienna as it is in New York. I feel sure that, had we done so, after that sleepless night, we would have gone to the Austrian police to ask for political asylum in Austria, and most likely would have been accepted. But prolonged uncertainty had exhausted me and I didn't have much time to think before answering. Ironically, now it's next to impossible for us to move again and settle elsewhere. We aren't political exiles or refugees anymore.

My "yes" answer to the American Tolstoy Foundation was a stupid mistake. I should have thought more before accepting the offer. We definitely

{p. 18} wouldn't have died without having food for just one day—we even had some food that we had taken with us from Lithuania. But after we signed that paper and received money from the Tolstoy Foundation for food and a hotel, we bought some good wine, enjoyed Vienna, became way too relaxed and felt too tired to do anything. We simply went along. The Tolstoy Foundation gave us money to survive and we did all that they wanted us to do. We capitulated without even trying to do something on our own. After all, we didn't seem to be facing a choice between life and death. It was only a choice between spending the night on a bench in some romantic park in Vienna and going to America. . .

Now, as I understand how it happened—how as an exile from the Soviet Union, I was easily duped by the American government's propaganda and lured to this country—I am embarrassed that I allowed myself to swallow the bait. My decision was thoughtless and irresponsible. Today I blame myself for some of the direct consequences that have followed from it. My wife and daughter now suffer a great deal because of our coming here.

Only after we signed the formal agreement to apply for political asylum in the United States were we provided with a room in a hotel and some pocket money for buying food. This is how we "chose" America. This is where our discovering of America began. With this beginning, I should perhaps not have been surprised that our supposed patrons' promises of good things to come turned out to be mostly empty.

When we first came to America, we lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where the Tolstoy Foundation continued to provide us with some financial assistance. They paid for our apartment which was in a basement of some rundown building and had roaches. Also they gave us a little bit of money for buying food. After a week or so, they arranged for us to have welfare assistance and promised to help with finding a job. But when some woman came to us and started to talk about all those options and jobs that she possibly could help us to get, we realized right away that all those offers ranged between work as a janitor and working at McDonald's. When we said to her that we didn't want such ridiculous "help," the Tolstoy Foundation refused to pay our rent any longer. We moved from that basement into the rectory of a local Lithuanian church. The welfare assistance that we received was so small that it wasn't sufficient to rent even the smallest apartment. The priest, a very nice person, invited us to live with him for free if we helped him a little bit with house chores. We were more than happy to do that and it gave us a possibility to relax, and to rest a little bit before taking further steps. I was looking for some acceptable employment, and also we wanted to learn some more English.

We felt that, as a journlist, my best chances were in New York where all the media and organizations are located. While in the Soviet Union, I had had numerous conversations with Americans (including diplomats and all those reporters in Moscow that I was collaborating with), all of whom always assured me that if I ever had to leave the USSR, I should go to America and only America. We also heard this daily from all the American radio propaganda,

{p. 19} such as the Voice of America that we had been listening to. As you can imagine, all those people were talking about America as a real "land of opportunities." They dunned it into our heads persistently that America was the only place for "people like us." They were talking to me about unprecedented possibilities and perspectives that were supposedly waiting for me in the USA. I just had to go there ... Of course, I trusted them. They weren't from the KGB. How could I know?

Cumulatively, you might say that the combination of official propaganda, and word of mouth from Americans encountered in Moscow was more effective than a very intensive brainwashing. While nobody promised me that if I come to New York, I would be hired by the New York Times, we naturally believed that in case we were forced to leave our country, I could probably find more opportunities in America than anywhere else. It had never been necessary to make a concrete promise—only to paint a glowing picture.

So we moved to New York. While there, we again lived in a Lithuanian church and helped its priest with house chores, so we didn't have to worry about room and board for a while. My wife also had medical insurance from the Catholic diocese of Brooklyn because she was pregnant with our daughter at that time. I continued to do some writing for Radio Liberty and also wrote freelance for the Russian-language daily newspaperbased in New York, Novoye Rlsskoye Slovo. Since I could make a little money from my writings and we didn't have any big expenses, we didn't need to worry too much about day- to-day survival at that moment. Therefore, I was enabled to concentrate on continuing my anti-Soviet activities.

While in New York, I collaborated with several right-wing American organizations. It had been my goal to get in touch with as many such organizations (not necessarily only right-wing) as possible and maybe eventuaUy even to try to get employment with one. With all my good connections among former Soviet dissidents who had come to the United States before me (and also among Lithuanian emigres in America), it wasn't difficult to get in touch with any organization that I wanted to be associated with. After all the brainwashing, I was naive enough to believe that those connections could eventually lead to satisfying results such as employment in my trade—which indeed, it might have, if I had come to New York in 1979, not 1989. Meanwhile, I wasn't paid any salary or even speaker's fees for my participation in all those activities, which I undertook mainly to try to help my friends that I had left in Lithuania, Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR.

My aim was not so much to assist our American "liberators" as to come to the aid of those people who were really fighting for national liberation and political freedoms inside the Soviet empire. I was successful in doing that by using the numerous possibilities that all those right-wing organizations provided. For example, if I could speak at an important conference in Washington, D.C. about our struggle in Lithuania and my speech was broadcast on C-Span, millions of TV viewers could find out more about what was going on in Lithuania and in the USSR. While they never had to pay me to participate, they did usually pay all my expenses, sending me, for example, to Canada to speak about Lithuania before big audiences in Toronto or Montreal. Had I been forced to finance my activities in America myself, I simply couldn't have afforded it.

{p. 20} I was unfamiliar with outfits such as Freedom House, for example, and took them at face value as straightforward sponsors of freedom without any particular elitist or reactionary agenda. I spoke at various conferences organized by what I now recognize to be the quasi-fascist Antibolshevic Bloc of Nations (ABN), the notorious World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the pro-capitalist Resistance International, and similar groups. I also participated in a few gatherings of American reactionaries, right libertarians, and wealthy conservatives.

Just before starting to write this book, I flipped through the pages of an old booklet that I had found in a stack of papers. It was the program for the 1990 U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC To my shame and chagrin, I admit that not only was I a participant, but I was one of the featured speakers at this conference, side by side with Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm and others ... What should I call men like these? It's hard to pick a name strong enough.

While living in the United States, I have earned a living mainly as a free-lance journalist, writing dozens of articles about life in Lithuania and the former Soviet Union. I also continued my collaboration with Radio Liberty for a short time after my arrival, but soon discovered they were cheating me out of my pay, sometimes paying me less that they supposed to, sometimes not paying me at all—I suppose in the presumption that I would never be able to find out. Not that I was concerned so much about being paid for what I was doing. Rather, I simply didn't want to be cheated and exploited just because I was a newcomer to this system and society. I knew that most of my reports were broadcast to the Soviet Union—I still had friends there who were listening to Radio Liberty every day.


For example, when Sakharov died, I did a very emotional piece and it was repeated on radio at least three times (even my mother in Lithuania caught it on the radio), but I wasn't paid for that particular piece—as if it hadn't been aired at all. I then sent an angry complaint to headquarters in Munich, and only after that did I receive my fee. This is how I realized that they were cheating me. It was nothing ideological, just business! Most likely they wanted to save some money by cheating people that they would dump soon, anyway. The CIA only employs people like me if they can exploit us for their purposes. Once the USSR collapsed, the Soviet human rights activists became less than useless to them and were simply abandoned to survive as they might. But for my part, I was already through with them.

I personally know quite a few former Soviet dissidents and human rights activists who were tricked into coming to America in the belief that America was a progressive country and a sincere champion of human rights. This is not to say that there weren't many others who came for many different reasons. I can't talk for all of them. (One of my former colleagues from the Lithuanian branch of the International Society for Human Rights who now lives in Chicago confessed to me not long ago that his biggest dream since he was six years old was about coming to America and becoming a millionaire!) Others maybe wanted to try something different than they had in the Soviet Union—a different kind of life, new interesting experiences. Many others likely believed that there could be some very tempting opportunities for professional work and a career in America. There were also many people among former

{p. 21} dissidents who simply wanted to start a new and normal life after all those years that they had spent in Soviet prison camps. Many of these simply wanted to start a family and have kids, and they didn't believe that it would be possible for them in the Soviet Union. There were also people who were seeking artistic freedom. Many dissident artists, musicians and especially writers, I know, were deeply disappointed here. Only a very few succeeded. Many of them now suffer a great deal from having been thrown into the dust bin of history. They all were used as naive pawns in the dirty psychological warfare that was going on between the two opposing superpowers, and when the Cold War was over, they were simply dumped. Now, those who had idealistic motivations have had to compromise their idealism in order to simply survive.

I have a friend, for example, who was a very well-known dissident in one of the former Soviet republics, who spent many years in prison for his activism. When he came to the United States in the mid-1980s, he was welcomed as a hero. He was even given a personal audience with President Reagan. For some time, he had a well-paying job as Executive Director of one of the many anti-Soviet centers in New York and Washington, DC. But his career as a professional anti-communist, his ticket to "success" in this system, lasted only until the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Empire disappeared from the map of the world, the demand for people like my friend automatically disappeared as well. Since there was no longer a "red menace" in the world, there was no need for fighters against it. No need for organizations with sonorous names which, in order to appear authentic and respectable, listed genuine Soviet dissidents as their "executive direct