The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

6. Living within the Truth in Choral Songs

160 chapter six Living within the Truth in Choral Songs Lithuania’s song festival traditions became explicitly non-Soviet in Vilnius on July 1, 1988. During the opening concert of Gaudeamus, a Baltic university students’ song festival, singers in the combined choir unfurled, for the first time together on stage, the three national tricolors : Lithuania’s yellow-green-red, Latvia’s red-white-red, and Estonia ’s blue-black-white. Soviet officials rushed to confiscate the flags, which at that moment were still illegal in Lithuania, but they were not able to push through the choir of seven thousand singers, clustered together tightly, singing, and so those who had revealed the festival’s true colors remained unpunished. Baltic flags then emerged at every festival event, unmindful of the scores of policemen who looked on. Choirs in the festival procession carried at least four Lithuanian, seven Latvian, and many more Estonian flags, with all singers carrying lapel ribbons of their national colors. From this moment on, public singing events in Lithuania would always include the flags that marked them as being non-Soviet. As usual under Soviet rule, the official government newspaper at first did not report these ubiquitous non-Soviet activities, instead reminding its readers several times that the festival was dedicated to the seventy-year anniversary of the Soviet Komsomol. But directly below its description of the opening concert, probably not by coincidence , there appeared an unrelated article about international trade with the timely title “All Flags Are Our Guests.”1 Two years later, in the summer of 1990, the national flags fluttered freely, and the Soviet Union’s red flag was absent at the three Baltic Living within the Truth in Choral Songs 161 national song festivals. There were no songs of Soviet patriotism, and no deferential references to the Communist Party, to Joseph Stalin or Vladimir Lenin, or even to the Soviet leader of the day, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the memory of previous Soviet song festivals was still fresh on the singers’ minds. During an intermission, friendly Estonians explained to me why they, along with thousands of others, once sang songs of loyalty to the Soviet state: Astrid: Do you like our song festival? Guntis: Yes, very much. Leidi: But ten years ago [when you were in Estonia] you didn’t see the festival? Guntis: No. That was in August. Leidi: No, so you can’t compare. Juta: You didn’t see it in Rīga either? Figure 10. Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian flags at the Gaudeamus Baltic students’ song festival, Vingis Park, Vilnius, July 3, 1988. The photographer , a singer in the Šviesa choir, recalls that many Estonian and Lithuanian banners fluttered in a “forest of flags” on the festival’s third day, but he could find only one Latvian for a picture of the three brother nations. Photo by Antanas Bajoriūnas. Living within the Truth in Choral Songs 162 Guntis: No. Leidi: Yes. Earlier there were was a speech by the first secretary of the Party, of course. They spoke Estonian with an accent, a much heavier accent than yours. Guntis: Aha. Juta: He doesn’t have an accent at all! Leidi: Then they would always greet the guests from Moscow. Sometimes it would be a cosmonaut, sometimes a Party officer whom they greeted very warmly. Juta: Mikoyan was here once. And didn’t Andropov come once? Leidi: Yes, I think. Astrid: The song festival always began— Juta: There were ten anthems: the anthem of the Soviet Union— Leidi: And all kinds of Lenin songs. Astrid: A song about Lenin, a song about Stalin, about the Party, then one or two of our own— Leidi: And songs of the peoples of the Soviet Union. They had to be included. They allowed only a couple of Estonian songs— Astrid: —after all of that. Leidi: In the entire festival program, only a couple of Estonian songs. Juta: But people all waited for those couple of songs. They were willing to sing all of the Stalins and Lenins. The most important thing was to sing those couple of songs, especially “My Fatherland Is My Beloved.” Astrid: And when they sang this song—and they didn’t allow it to be sung often—then all the people stood up and sang along, and this song has always been sung [unofficially]. Leidi: And then, what was done so that people wouldn’t sing those fatherland songs: then...