How Lithuania Helped Take Down the Soviet Union

by Richard M. Ebeling January 18, 2016

This year, 2016, will mark the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union from the political map of the world. A quarter of a century ago, the menace of Soviet-led communism, which had haunted the globe since the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, disintegrated from within and passed into the dustbin of history.  The Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe that Stalin had imposed in the aftermath of Second World War began to crumble in 1989 and 1990, as the communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania were replaced with democratic-oriented governments.  The collapse of the Iron Curtain that had divided the European continent since 1945 was symbolized most dramatically with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989..........Whether it was in the dirty government-run food shops with their empty shelves, or in the dilapidated taxicabs with their gruff drivers behind the wheel, or in the homes of the Moscow intelligentsia, all you heard was anger, resentment and hatred for what seventy-odd years of communist rule had produced. Wasted, destructive and cruel years: that was the epitaph that almost every Russian verbalized in summarizing twentieth century Soviet history........Such resentments and anger were, probably, the most intense in the three Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania........To Read More.....