Showdown: The Lithuanian Rebellion and the Breakup of the Soviet Empire

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Showdown explores the revival of the Lithuanian independence movement, beginning in 1988 when the popular front movement, Sajudis, was founded and including its February 1990 victory in the first free elections in the Soviet Union. A month later, Lithuania declared its independence. But as American author and political scientist Richard J. Krickus explains, by 1990 Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had begun scaling back reforms and courting the neo-Stalinists. Lithuanian independence threatened to upset the Soviet Union's uneasy status quo. The Soviets' deadly response and the movement's ultimate success - with its far-reaching consequences - stunned the world.

Krickus was in Lithuania as an elections monitor during the momentous days leading to independence. His eyewitness account explains how this nation of fewer than four million set in motion the forces that broke apart the vast Soviet Union. Based on Dr. Krickus's personal knowledge of the dangerous events and the courageous Lithuanians involved, this dramatic account also shows how Americans aided this unforeseen catalyst to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The final drama unfolded in January 1991 and culminated on the thirteenth - now known to the world as Bloody Sunday. When the Lithuanian people learned that Soviet troops and tanks had moved on Vilnius, thousands of ordinary citizens converged on the TV tower and the Parliament building. The troops opened fire on the defenceless demonstrators who were clubbed, shot at, and run over by tanks. Fourteen people were killed and several hundred were injured. Showdown includes firsthand accounts of many of these brave, unarmed men and women who stood defiant in an almost unbelievable show on nonviolent civil disobedience.

Showdown deftly demonstrates how the Lithuanians, in restoring their independence and then heroically defending it, proved that citizens of the USSR could drive a stake into the heart of the Soviet leviathan, which would sink into history soon after the rebellion.

Though the Lithuanians were victorious in their struggle against the Soviet Union, the country's independence and its democracy are tenuous. As Krickus warns, unless the West takes concrete steps to safeguard democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the freedom which was so hard won could be lost again.