Vytautas Landsbergis
Vytautas Landsbergis was the musicologist who led Lithuania out of the Soviet Union, the chairman of the Sajudis movement who on 11 March 1990 had the newly elected parliament declare the restoration of the independent state of 1918, the first Soviet republic to do so, who held the parliament building through the economic blockade Gorbachev imposed and the night of 13 January 1991 when Soviet paratroops took the television tower in Vilnius and killed fourteen people at its gates while the crowd sang outside the parliament, and who was the country's head of state until the recognition that followed the failed coup in Moscow that August. He lost the presidential election of 1993, led the conservatives for a decade, and sat in the European Parliament. He was born in Kaunas in 1932, the son of an architect and a doctor who had both been in the resistance, and grew up under the occupations. He taught the piano and the history of music at the conservatory in Vilnius for thirty years and was the world's authority on the painter-composer Ciurlionis, which was the whole of his public life until 1988. Sajudis, the reform movement, was founded in June 1988 in the opening Gorbachev had made, with Landsbergis as one of its founders and, from November, its chairman, chosen because he was a professor and not a Communist. The movement swept the elections to the Supreme Council in February 1990 and elected him its chairman, which under the restored constitution made him head of state. The declaration of 11 March passed by 124 votes to none. Moscow answered with an oil and gas blockade in April, and the Lithuanians sat it out. In January 1991, with the parliament barricaded and the tanks in the streets, he stayed in the building and telephoned the world, and the killing at the tower turned the Soviet public against Gorbachev's hardliners. Iceland recognised Lithuania in February, the rest of the world after August, and the last Soviet troops left in 1993. He was beaten for the presidency in February 1993 by the former Communist Brazauskas, whom the voters trusted more with the economy, and led the Homeland Union in opposition and as speaker from 1996 to 2000. He is the grand old man of the state, still writing, and his grandson Gabrielius has been foreign minister.
- Lived: 1932 CE – ?
- Nationality: Lithuanian
- Roles: head of state, politician, musicologist
