_____
On the eve of the killings, on January 12, there was a deceptive calmness in the air. There was confusion. We knew Lithuania was on the agenda in Moscow and that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was sending a special delegation to Vilnius. Because the situation was so tense, I spoke several times with the chairman of that delegation on the 12th, urging him to come directly to the Lithuanian capital. But he said he had to go to neighboring Belarus, and that he would spend the night there. I called him again and again to try to persuade him to come straight to Vilnius. But because they didn’t want to be in Vilnius that evening, I felt something was wrong. There was a similar situation in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1989, when unarmed people were massacred by Soviet troops at night. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze stayed in Moscow on the eve of the massacre, and it was said that there was no need for him to go to Tbilisi. The situation in Vilnius was very similar. When the Soviet delegation didn’t agree to come to Vilnius, I was very worried.
That evening, I decided to go home. I wanted to take a bath after being at Parliament for so many days. But when I got home, information came in that the gates were thrown open at Soviet barracks and the tanks were preparing to move. I got home at around midnight, but went back to parliament immediately.
By then, it was clear tanks were moving. You could hear the roar of the tanks. But for a while, we didn’t know what their target was. Then, from inside Parliament, we could hear the shooting of machine guns and tanks, and we could see the gunfire in the night sky.--Vytautas Lansbergis, President of Lithuania