All the children born in 1989 turned a quarter century old this year. When they entered the world, the Soviet Union was coming apart at its seams. For most of their sentient lives, there has been no “Evil Empire.” The enemy of their youth turned on an axis that ran from Iran and Iraq to North Korea and lacked a unified ideological center. 1989 is the year the Berlin Wall fell. Many of us still remember televised images of men and women dancing in the streets waving champagne bottles, while others pounded at the graffiti-spattered cement with sledgehammers and pickaxes. President Obama visited Poland in 2014 in an echo of a Bush Senior’s presidential visit to then-Soviet Warsaw 25 years earlier. Yet, it was one of many countries he could have chosen: 1989 was host to many lesser-known yet no-less-historic moments. On August 23, 1989, some two million people held hands across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in a massive pro-independence demonstration they called the Baltic Way. Lithuania went on to be the first satellite state to formally declare independence from the Soviet Union. The first nation to declare independence from America’s archenemy of the day, and most Americans couldn’t tell Lithuania from Lichtenstein, or Lesotho, for that matter. That was as true in 1989 as it is today. Authoritarianism seemed to be under attack from all sides in 1989. Some of those struggles dominated headlines for days, while others barely rated a paragraph on the page six world briefs. A coup in Paraguay overthrew the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. More than a million Chinese students took to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand freedom and democracy. Aung San Suu Kyi was put her under house arrest by the Burmese military junta in 1989. Her political party won the next year’s election, but the generals declined to hand over power. Though Suu Kyi was eventually freed and elected to parliament, but military still holds the reins of power in a country we now call Myanmar. The Evil Empire was already beginning to turn on its axis in 1989. Thomas Friedman won the National Book Award for nonfiction that year for From Beirut to Jerusalem, a book that is as resonant today as it was then. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses climbed the New York Times bestseller list and became a cause célèbre when octogenarian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. Khomeini would die only a few months later. Yesterday America formally ended its “combat mission” in Afghanistan, thirteen years after we first arrived. In 1989 it was Soviet tanks and Red Army troops that were marching out of Afghanistan after their own nine years of failed war. Back then the Soviets were fighting against the mujahedeen. The same mujahedeen that we armed back then, who went on to join merge with Taliban. In fact, 1989 is the year a militant group was founded in the region that called itself “The Base,” or Al Qaeda in Arabic. At least one of its members is known to have attended a meeting in Oklahoma City in December that year. Even as America’s official enemy abroad was in transition in 1989, here in the US young people ages 16 to 24 were participating in the labor market at their highest rate in history: nearly 76 percent of them either had a job or were looking for work. In 2014 the labor participation rate for that age group is almost the lowest in history, at only 60.5 percent. About 13 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line back then. Today, it’s closing in on 15 percent. Median household income right now buys $4,417 less than what could back in 1989. A gallon of gas cost about $0.90 at the pump in 1989, which would be $1.71 in today’s money. The national average hit a high of $3.76 a gallon this past June, but after falling dramatically for weeks is around $2.30 right now. Despite it all we were happy then, and we’re happy again today. In 1989, Bobby McFerrin’s upbeat ditty "Don't Worry Be Happy" took the Grammy for Song of the Year. Twenty-five years later, people around the world made fan videos for another “Happy” song by Pharrell Williams. But were we all so happy? Also on the charts that year was a very different expression of the 1989 zeitgeist: N.W.A.’s groundbreaking gansta rap album, Straight Outta Compton. Twenty-five years later, Hollywood is ready to make the movie, starring... Paul Giamatti? Just as N.W.A. was making waves across the radio dial, a little girl whose mother would call her Amethyst was conceived in Australia. She would grow up to be Iggy Azalea and have a number one rap hit on the Billboard charts in 2014. A company called Time, Inc. merged with Warner Communications in 1989 to create the largest media company in the world at that time, becoming perhaps the most hated 25 years later. This year, Time Warner spun off the 91 year old eponymous magazine that started it all, leaving it to twist in the stock market winds. History is a hall of mirrors where the precedent of one event is the antecedent of another. It’s easy to get lost in a maze of dates and references that cross-reference each other. A quick search online will give you list after list of events by year, but which dots should we connect? The Big Data evangelists might say they can build an algorithm to find the answer. But will their answer give us meaning? When the organizers of the Baltic Way selected August 23 as the date for their 370-mile human chain in 1989, that wasn’t a random choice. They were reaching back fifty years to mark the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where Stalin and Hitler quietly divided up Eastern Europe between themselves. You’ve may never heard of the Baltic Way or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, though both of them changed the world. As 2014 comes to a close, take a moment to remember what happened in 1989, the events you lived through and the ones you never knew. They tell us as much about the world we live in today as the one we will live in for the next 25 years.
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It's exciting to see my book set in Lithuania getting some attention from a newspaper in the Baltic region. The Baltic Times is an English-language paper based in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, with offices in Riga, Latvia, and Vilnius, Lithuania. They've just run a terrific review by Jonathan Brown of Love Songs of the Revolution. Brown is an Irish journalist based in Nablus who writes about Palestine and the Baltics. He's also a periodic editor at The Baltic Times. Brown read the book through the lens of its historical and political context, which is what sets his review apart. A pivotal event in the novel is the massive Baltic Way demonstration that took place on August 23, 1989. Few people outside of the region are familiar with the demonstration and its historical importance. Brown describes it this way: "The Baltic Way triumphed because a multitude of voices became one. United by song, hands, and political ambition, the Baltics formed an immutable force for peace and independence." He calls the book a "Soviet whodunit," and writes about how, at the end of the Cold War, the West viewed and even exoticized the East: "What compelled journalists in droves to the Baltic States and Eastern Europe after independence and the fall of the Soviet Union? Certainly, there was a voyeuristic allure in lifting the veil or 'curtain.' Mostly though, wasn’t it about seeing a world where the West’s political morals were turned upside down? Wasn’t it about seeing a world where corruption goes unchecked, the bad guys don’t go to jail, and the good guys lose out? It’s exactly this political climate that Mauldin coolly and impressively puts on display in 'Love Songs.'" While covering the politics, Brown also gets to the poetics. What more can an author hope for from any reader? "Entanglements aside, the mystery slides sleekly from one suspense, emotional pang, or clue to another, ensuring impeccable timing and delivery. In this, Mauldin’s prose and poise equals that of the highest calibre mystery writing. The book calls to be picked up, even if it’s put down. Poetic gems glitter throughout. Mauldin is sensitive to detail and nuance, her prose is always vivid and alive." We are going to party like it's 1989! This year, August 23 marks the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way, a massive independence demonstration that stretched across three countries, and serves as a major turning point in my novel. So it couldn't be more perfect that the official launch party for the book takes place that day. Please join me at 2pm on August 23 at the downtown LA Central Library for the party. We'll have live music and Lithuanian snacks, and Skylight Books will be on hand with copies of the book for sale. Here are all the details. Hope to see you there! Book Launch Party for Love Songs of the Revolution Saturday, August 23 at 2:00 pm Los Angeles Central Library 630 W. 5th St. (map) LA, CA 90071 Meeting Room A (near the 5th Street entrance) Parking info Reviews have been coming in for Love Songs of the Revolution. Of course I think you should read the book, but you don't have to trust me. Ask these fine people: Vilnius might as well be a character, for Kudirka's relationship with the city is romantic, sensual, and redemptive. When Kudirka finds the body of his murdered wife, he grieves her death, calling her "beloved," which is also the way he repeatedly describes the city, "my beloved Vilnius," "my beloved city," "like an old lover." Both his wife and home are his lovers, and Kudirka seems to perform a bit of psychological displacement by trying his best (which isn't very good) to help the independence movement happening in Vilnius in order to allay his guilt over having been a fairly pitiful husband. Kirdurka admits as much, realizing that "if I believed in nothing else, perhaps I could believe in that. If Vilnius was to be an epicenter of a great uprising against the Soviets, then I had to be part of it. For Natalie, if not for myself" and "Vilnius [was] the only lover I'd ever been faithful to." This devotion and romance for his home is his redeeming quality, and it is the thing that pulls us through to the end of the narrative. However, the narrative is not the end of the story. In fact, what happens after Kudirka's memoir is where Mauldin's real genius shows itself. All this changes when Martynas’ wife is murdered. The authorities are reluctant to investigate. He learns that his wife had secrets. He feels compelled to search for the truth. He becomes embroiled with revolutionaries, criminals and spies. All this against the backdrop of Vilnius, a city alive with political and cultural change, a city he writes about with all the passion of the exile. by Goodreads reviewer Kate Vane Solid take on the suspenseful thriller, suitably twisty, takes place in Lithuania in the late 80s, which gives (as is its aim) an intimate and relatable feel to big seemingly cold themes of political unrest and espionage. by Goodreads author Leo Robertson The good natured self-loathing of the main character is explained by the surprising twists introduced in the second portion of the book, where the story takes an unexpected and delightful turn. Overall, Mauldin's masterly prose, ability to create extraordinarily believable characters and brilliant insights into power dynamics, writ large and small, make her an author to watch. by Amazon reader L. Lueders
While doing research on Lithuanian culture for Love Songs of the Revolution, I came upon a YouTube video that changed everything for me. Fuzzy images from a massive demonstration in 1989 are overlaid with a rock anthem whose words I couldn't understand, but whose meaning couldn't be more clear.
The Baltic Way was a major milestone in the Singing Revolution that swept the three Baltic nations in the late 1980s and ultimately led to their independence. No one knows exactly how many people showed up in the streets that day, but estimates run between one and two million people across the three countries.
Music and especially mass singing festivals have long played a major role in Baltic political movements. The rock anthem being sung in 1989 is "The Baltics are Waking Up," written especially for the Singing Revolution, in all three languages. The recording is sung by leading singers from each country:
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way. It's an amazing story and a historic moment in European history. We in the West know about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in China, both of which happened the same year, but have never heard about the Baltic Way. Once I learned about it, I knew it would have an important place in my novel. There on he streets of Vilnius in 1989, the crowds holding hands around them and singing for their freedom, the lives of Martynas and Indre are irrevocably changed. |
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