Freedom Lessons from Lithuania with Love

This year, on January 13th, I will not be in Lithuania for the day of remembrance of the tragic January Events of 1991. I will be visiting Taiwan. 

Preparing for the trip I can’t shake the feeling of how much connects Lithuania and Taiwan. Despite great distances, differing cultural and historic backgrounds, there are forces that make us feel kinship. 

In recent years the enormous changes in global politics force us to deliberate how best we can defend what we cherish: Freedom, democracy, our way of life. 

If you attended our January 13th commemorations you would probably guess it is a day of mourning. We remember those who were killed, we rail at the injustice of the attack. 

Not even a year had passed since our declaration of independence, during which we endured an economic and energy blockade and received only a cold shoulder from the West. Then Gorbachev decided to end this brief chapter of our history militarily, sending his tanks out against the unarmed civilians of Vilnius.

The tragedy touched us all. It would be hard to find a family without at least one member who stepped out of the comfort of their home and went into that dark January night to defend their independence.

But while we mourn, we must remind ourselves that this is also a day of victory. 

When you look around Vilnius today you see the fruits of that victory, you see a free, democratic, European city, and what's more—one of the happiest countries in the world! These are the aims that our struggle and sacrifice allowed us to achieve.

The first lesson is this—belief in victory is far more important than we think. 

Any aggressor will try to force you to think that victory is impossible. You are too small, too insignificant and weak, resistance will only prolong your suffering. But if you ignore this lie and believe in the possibility of victory, you can become strong enough to achieve it.

In small frontline countries where we faced occupations, partitions and all sorts of injustices, it is more normal to emphasise sadness and tragedy, rather than triumph. But the Soviet Union lost, Gorbachev lost, they lost the whole damn Cold War and we won. So, as we remember the fallen, we should also be building monuments of victory so that we and our visitors might be reminded that victory is always possible.

If you walk around the old town of Vilnius you will stumble upon Iceland Street, distinguishable by the large number of bars and the happy young people inside them. The street name might not surprise you much, because we also have a Street of the Germans, a Street of the Jews, a Street of the Latvians and so on. Most of these earnt their name because of the people who lived there during previous centuries. But there were never any Icelanders living in Vilnius. A plaque on one of the buildings in Iceland Street explains—Iceland was the first country to recognize Lithuania, way before everyone else.

After the official worldwide recognition of Lithuania, President Bush Snr was asked if it was a mistake for the US not to be the first to recognize us. He quipped that nobody will remember who was the first. Well, every year we celebrate Iceland Day with a street party. We are grateful to every country that recognized us, but the name of Iceland rings louder in our memories.

When I observe Ukrainians fighting for their country another lesson stands out—friends come in very different shapes and sizes. Who could have imagined a Ukrainian minister standing together with a Syrian minister after the fall of Assad's regime? And yet here we are—Ukraine is about to become a major partner for the new Syria. And what about the weapons and assistance to Ukraine from Australia, South Korea and Taiwan? Friendships like these take a while to be established and require constant nurturing, but for frontline states they can make the difference between existence and collapse. 

My last lesson comes from Lithuania’s struggle in 1990. Just after we declared our independence, the Soviets introduced a heavy embargo on everything we depended upon. We received no more goods or energy from the Soviet Union.

We started reaching out to our would-be friends in the West for recognition and help. Instead we received a request in the form of a letter from President Mitterand and Chancellor Kohl requesting that Lithuania declares a moratorium on our claims to independence. That would effectively have meant abandoning the idea of an independent state and returning to the fold of the Soviet Union. If we would have listened and acted upon that request, we would have lost our country and our future. Maybe even the Soviet Union would still exist, propped up by the West’s fear of its collapse.

Our Parliament devised a clever solution—Lithuania would give up its fight for independence as requested, but only after the Soviet Union recognized it. Of course by then there would be nothing to give up, because the country would already be recognized by its, now former, occupier. We didn’t act in the way our friends and future allies wanted us to. We did our own thing, and that is why we have a country now. 

Where would Ukraine be if their leaders had followed the advice to leave the country, if they agreed to de-escalate and start "loving Russia" as suggested by a famous podcaster. Who knows where Russia would be now, whose cities would be occupied? Today's reality is scary enough, so I don't even want to imagine a scenario in which Ukraine decided not to fight.

So my advice is—do your thing. Stand your ground, defend your freedom and you will define reality on your own terms. This is what history has taught us. There is a big chance that I would not be travelling to Taiwan right now if today’s reality hadn’t been defined by Lithuania in 1990 and President Zelenskyy in 2022.

Frontline countries understand these principles perfectly well. Each country that has fought for its independence has a story of its own, about alliances, about friends that revealed themselves at the darkest hour, about bravery and defiance in the face of a formidable adversary, and about the belief in victory that pushed them that last mile, allowing them to live to tell the tale.

And in this we stand united, Lithuania, Ukraine, Taiwan and all the others that go on and on against all the odds, remembering in their hearts and in their history books that freedom is never free.