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Freedom Collection

Interviews with Vytautas Landsbergis

Interviewed October 31, 2024

Sometimes Gorbachev is seen and evaluated as a single person who wanted to make or did not succeed to make great things. We are in the Soviet system. We understood very well that Gorbachev is selected for the role by, maybe, elder guys of Communist leadership as looking more young, more fresh, with some ideas of more cooperative stance towards the West. [Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 – ) served as the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 – 1991 and as President of the Soviet Union from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991.]

And this way, maybe meaning to confuse the West to get assistance to the failing Soviet Union. It was a complicated game. And in this, Gorbachev very probably felt himself also an ambitious leader. Be placed in the West– he wanted to be placed. And so some reforms were promoted by him with the idea that they can be limited and stopped in a framework, which means the Soviet Union [is] saved, not allowed to [go] bankrupt totally. He failed. Because the forces liberated from previous system of total control, were not possible to put back.

As for Lithuanian Sajudis, as I´ve said, yes, we are for perestroika but for the perestroika to the end, which is the free will of nations inside of Soviet Union and how they wish to live. [Sajudis, meaning “movement” in Lithuanian, was a civil society organization formed in 1988 to advocate the restoration of the country’s independence from the USSR. Perestroika, a Russian word meaning “restructuring” refers to the efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the USSR’s political and economic systems.]