THE BALTIC TRIANGLE 455Landsbergis exclaimed: ‘There’s only one flaw in the argument: you
wouldn’t allow yourself to be dropped into our lap like a Christmas
present.’^11
Yakovlev’s performance gave rise to criticism in the leadership in
Moscow. Filipp Bobkov of the KGB was later to claim that Yakovlev
had a habit of saying one thing in the Kremlin and something different
to anti-Soviet militants in Armenia, Azerbaijan and the USSR’s other
republics.^12
Yakovlev claimed to be doing his duty on the Politburo’s behalf.^13
His notes highlighted the worry that Baltic intellectuals were being
drawn to leaders who made rowdy accusations against Moscow. But he
also reported that nobody had spoken in an anti-Soviet fashion at the
Vilnius meeting. According to Yakovlev, the main criticism had been
about how the Moscow authorities monopolized industrial decisions,
even telling Lithuanian food-processing enterprises how to cook their
cocoa beans. The influx of Russians into the labour force incurred dis-
content. There was also a concern about Lithuania’s Ignalina nuclear
power station, which was built to the same design as the one which
had exploded at Chernobyl. Yakovlev doubted that the communist
leaderships in the Baltic republics recognized the scale of the prob-
lems; he called them apathetic, rigid and intolerant.^14 But he refused to
be downcast. Sąjūdis, he emphasized, was a multi-layered organization
with a diversity of viewpoints and the Lithuanian separatists did not
yet have the upper hand in it. He offered no practical advice, except to
suggest that Lithuanians and Latvians ought to be able to travel abroad
more freely.^15
Gorbachëv continued to insist that the region belonged legiti-
mately to the USSR. His aide Chernyaev tried to persuade him
otherwise, but to no effect. Gorbachëv was willing to make all manner
of concessions short of secession. The Lithuanian, Latvian and Esto-
nian Popular Fronts gathered ever more support for independence. In
their view, they were trying to undo an illegal process of annexation
rather than seeking to secede; and the Politburo’s mixture of threats
and promises served only to agitate opinion in the Baltic region.
The Lithuanian Communist Party leader Algirdas Brazauskas, who
was livelier than Yakovlev had claimed, sympathized with the clamour
for a declaration of national independence. Gorbachëv at last appreci-
ated the scale of the threat. On 24 January 1989 he told the Politburo
of his readiness to allow an experiment in ‘national economics’ and
‘democracy’ in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He wanted this done in