1988 Reports

Human Rights: A Millennial Year

Cullen, Robert B.

On July 9, 1988, an extraordinary event took place in Vilnius, the capital of the Soviet republic of Lithuania. Tens of thousands of people jammed a soccer stadium in Vingis Park for a political rally. Ostensibly, they came to hear a report by Lithuanian delegates to that month’s Communist Party conference in Moscow, and to support Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign for perestroika and glasnost’. But the banners they bore and the flags they unfurled told what these demonstrators were really about. They meant to celebrate their national identity, an identity repressed since the Soviet Union annexed their country in 1940. They meant to demand political changes that would only begin with the program Gorbachev had outlined in Moscow a week earlier. Their flags were the long-banned yellow, green and red tricolor of pre-Soviet Lithuania. Their banners bore slogans of revolt: “Self-rule for Lithuania!” “Abolish the Privileged Class!” Their song was the long-banned national anthem, “Lithuania, Our Fatherland.” For the benefit of those too young to have heard it and learned it, the organizers passed out cards with the lyrics printed on them.