Music Professor Is Secession’s Unlikely Leader

VILNIUS, Soviet Union —  A shiny black Volvo, complete with chauffeur, takes Vytautas Landsbergis to work these days. A uniformed guard stands outside his apartment building, and he has traded his corduroy jacket with elbow patches for a rumpled suit.

But Landsbergis, 57, a professor of music known for his political inexperience, pedantic speeches and slow, methodical approach to life, is still one of the most unlikely national leaders--a bespectacled, mild-mannered grandfather who defied the Kremlin to become president of a Lithuania now asserting its independence.

In the last several days, he has been in the eye of the storm, striving to maintain calm in his republic as Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev steps up pressure on Lithuanians to denounce their Parliament’s declaration of independence.

But stern warnings from the Kremlin should be viewed as nothing more than a negotiating tactic, Landsbergis told his countrymen Wednesday night after Gorbachev demanded that all Lithuanians turn in their weapons and ordered the KGB to tighten security around the republic’s borders. Lithuanians, Landsbergis said, should remain firm in the conviction that “wisdom will prevail . . . (and) we’ll meet tomorrow serene and united.”

Landsbergis, who wears a goatee and walks slightly hunched over, became the first non-Communist chief of a Soviet republic earlier this month, hours before Lithuania’s lawmakers adopted a resolution declaring independence. He defeated his Communist rival, the popular Algirdas Brazauskas, by a margin of more than 2 to 1.

Many Lithuanians are still asking how he did it.

The answer, his supporters say, can be found in his patient, diplomatic approach to resolving the conflicts that could have short-circuited Lithuania’s two-year drive for independence. This approach earned him the nickname Gudri Lape , Lithuanian for Shrewd Fox.

“He is kind of the unity candidate; he brings everyone together,” said Stasys Kropas, a deputy in the Lithuanian Parliament and a member of the independence movement Sajudis, which Landsbergis helped to found.

Another lawmaker and Sajudis member, Mecys Laurinkus, agreed with this assessment.

“He has been the main generator of ideas in Sajudis and has maintained stability inside the movement,” Laurinkus said in an interview. “He is analytical and has intuition. The slogans and the facade of Sajudis are very well known to Lithuanians. But Prof. Landsbergis has worked behind the scenes, trying to do the real work of policy.”

But even his supporters, among them Lithuanian-American Jurate Kazickas, recognize his weak points. Kazickas, who is visiting Vilnius, described a dinner given for Landsbergis last summer in a townhouse on New York’s upper East Side and attended by a number of New York luminaries.

“When he stood up to speak,” she recalled, “people were sort of straining to hear, and as he talked, his head seemed to get lower and lower and lower. Sometimes you kind of wish he was a Lech Walesa personality, more dynamic, which is the same complaint the people of Lithuania have. But he is a good man, and that goodness shines through.”

His critics are harsher, wondering aloud how he can possibly negotiate the terms of independence with a smooth politician like Gorbachev.

“He talks too long, he has no charisma, he speaks like a professor, kind of lecturing all the time,” said Brazauskas supporter and former government spokesman Ceslovas Jursenas. “We need a leader who can get to the point fast, who can be short and sharp. If this man in this elevated position is going to talk this way, it is going to bore us.”

Asked about himself, Landsbergis is reserved, far more willing to discuss his ideals.

“In my speech in which I presented myself as a candidate for the presidency of the Supreme Council,” he told a news conference last week, “I emphasized what I believe to be fundamental, the desire of our people to be free and independent.”

In some ways, Landsbergis came naturally by his role as a revolutionary leader. It was almost his birthright. His paternal grandfather, Gabrielius, was a journalist and playwright who struggled against czarist rule in the late 19th Century, writing for underground newspapers in the outlawed Lithuanian language about the need for a free Lithuania. Imprisoned and deported for his activities, he never lived to see his goals realized.

But he passed his values on to Landsbergis. Lithuania’s president “has the heart and soul of his grandfather,” according to his father, a well-known architect, also named Vytautas, who fought with the underground against the Nazis in World War II.

“In some sense, I’m continuing the work of my grandfather, because our goal is the same,” Landsbergis said in an interview.

Landsbergis was just 11 years old when his teen-age brother was arrested by the Germans for taking part in Lithuanian nationalist demonstrations. By dint of repetition, the idea was soon ingrained: For the sake of self-preservation, the Lithuanian nation must shake off foreign rule.

But Landsbergis, a man of restraint as well as action, patiently bided his time. A studious, serious youth, he was arrested only once and held briefly after inadvertently wandering into a restricted zone.

As an adult, he threw himself into music, becoming an accomplished pianist as well as a music historian. He has written nine books about music and recorded two albums.

But he wove the language of politics into his esoteric work, specializing in the study of Miklayos Ciurlionis, a nationalist 19th-Century Lithuanian composer and painter whose art was banned by the Soviet government until three years ago.

Only in the last two years, after helping to found Sajudis, has he been forced to squeeze in time for his music between political activities--perhaps one of his biggest frustrations in his current role.

“He has become purely a politician, something we never believed would happen,” said his 35-year-old daughter, Birute Cechanaviciene, an organist and musicologist. “But this is a very important time for all Lithuanians, and it was not he who came to politics. It was politics that came to him.”

The road he has set out on is likely to be a difficult one. The day of his election brought his first conflict as president--with Brazauskas, a fiery orator who was urging his countrymen to delay before declaring independence.

The difference in the two men’s styles was demonstrated when the Lithuanian Parliament opened its historic session this month. As hundreds of people stood outside, Brazauskas arrived in a big white car, impeccably dressed, smiling and waving as the crowd chanted his name.

While Landsbergis’ supporters were wondering when he would show up, the future president was already sitting in the chambers, having slipped in through a back door.

After losing to Landsbergis, an angry Brazauskas rejected a role in the new government and fled to Moscow, returning only three days later. But he has softened his stand and agreed to serve as deputy prime minister.

Today, Landsbergis lives with his second wife, Grazina, in a two-story, five-room apartment, a five-minute drive from the Parliament building and his plush new corner office, complete with seven telephones.

His apartment is cluttered with mementos that give away his aristocratic background--vases, crystal, antiques--objects his family was able to hide when the Soviets were nationalizing the property of the wealthy here after they annexed the republic in 1940.

The apartment also boasts a baby grand piano and an imported stereo system. But the figurative heart of the home can be found up the wooden spiral staircase, on the second floor, in Landsbergis’ study, which is decorated with modern art and a worn Persian rug and piled floor-to-ceiling with books, newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages.

In a corner is his desk, and right next to it a bed, unmade when a reporter visited, the sheets and blankets pushed aside as though Landsbergis had leaped out and, without looking back, rushed to another session of Parliament, another planning meeting.

“Life is so hectic now,” said his wife, the only person home at the time. “I’m very concerned about his sleeping habits.”

It is the details as often as the historic resolutions that keep Landsbergis up late. His attention to minutiae was made clear in a meeting attended by journalists the day before independence was declared.

The deputies were discussing what Lithuania should choose as the melody for its new national anthem, “Lithuania Our Homeland.”

Someone suggested one tune, but Landsbergis rose to argue. He said that because the proposed melody was in F-sharp, it would be too difficult to sing. He led the deputies in a half-hour discussion of the topic, as though it were the most important issue he faced.

He finally won his point--a victory that seemed as important to Landsbergis the aristocratic musician as winning the presidency a day later would be to Landsbergis the revolutionary politician.