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A. Sakalas is one of those few politicians who never changed political party: when he founded the Social Democratic Party with his comrades in 1989, he remained a member, although he strongly opposed the merger of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) and the Democratic Labor Party. Lithuania (LDDP).
A. Sakalas, who is 90, calls his best trait a tendency to speak his mind. As a result, he does not wrap words in cotton when he talks about any topic: “My strong characteristic is that I loved the truth and I was never afraid to say it without wrapping anything in cotton. I was a seeker of the truth, I cared to tell the truth, not to fool myself “.
He was exiled for a letter to a friend
Although A. Sakalas was born in Jusiškis village, Anykščiai district, when his parents moved to Kaunas, he grew up in the city. The family moved to the city because A. Sakal’s father no longer had enough land divided by his own father for all of his children, so after receiving a small amount of money, he and his family tried their luck in the capital. . When he was a student, A. Sakalas still spent summers in the village with his uncle, so he knew how to do all the farm work.
While studying at the “Aušra” children’s gymnasium in Kaunas, A. Sakalas got into trouble. There were only several years left before graduating from school, when the Kaunas KGB took his letter to a friend of the people at the place of his exile; this friend and his entire family had been deported. In the letter, A. Sakalas was outraged at taking people to collective farms.
“They received a signal that I was anti-Soviet and a review of my letters had begun,” Sakalas said.
The politician is convinced that a friend of his class denounced his anti-Soviet sentiment. According to A. Sakalas, Kęstutis Sadauskas, a former KGB employee who had already moved to Lithuania during the independence period, showed him the report of the then KGB Major Nachmanas Dušanskis to the address that a person who VL had him visited and had asked to protect. his family from repression.
According to the document, which was seen by A. Sakalas himself, N. Dušanskis allegedly asked about anti-Soviet people and the person whose initials were VL called A. Sakalas. A. Sakalas later found such a report in the Special File.
The only class friend of A. Sakalas, whose initials were VL, was Vytautas Landsbergis, his best friend.
V. Landsbergis himself claims that this version was changed for A. Sakalas by people related to the KGB, and A. Sakalas simply swallowed the bait.
“It just came to our knowledge then kagėbynas once he changed that version and somehow adopted it. And enjoy. He tortures himself all his life and leads me. For kagėbyn it was a very easy job. They do nothing and do nothing more than oppose the people ”, V. Landsbergis told tv3.lt.
At that time, A. Sakalas did not have this information, he thought he could arrest anyone. From those times, he remembers stalking pranks with classmates along with Landsber and others. For example, a male gym classmate who had a girlfriend decided to post a fake letter. The boys who wrote “Dear Justai, let’s go … I’m going to get …” on a sheet of paper put a note in the envelope of a letter sent by the same girl and secretly awaited the reaction of the partner: that this it’s our job. “
Meanwhile, for A. Sakal’s letter to a friend in exile, a special meeting in Moscow gave him 8 years in a forced regime camp. Taken to the camp, A. Sakalas still tried to run, but to no avail.
“When they took me to a strict regime camp, I ran out of the wagon. One wall of the car was rotten, I managed to break it and slip through the hole. They shot me but they didn’t hit me. Then the train started to stop and I danced to the ground. I chased myself for about 12 kilometers, but fooled the pursuers: I ran straight at first, but since I knew I was going to catch dogs, I sprinkled chopped tobacco and turned it aside. The dogs ran straight and I turned to the side. Then I approached the train station, I boarded a passenger train, I drove, but the guards raised suspicions that I was hatless and without short hair. And my friends in the car ripped off my hat as I walked through the hole. They didn’t want me to run away, they were afraid to shoot everyone. But I ran away, they only grabbed my hat and I was left with my head uncovered and my hair short, so I was suspicious of the colleague ”, recalls A. Sakalas.
Therefore, a short haircut resulted in the refugee being captured and handed over to a strict regime colony in Jezkazgan, Kazakhstan. A. Sakalas recalls that two prisoners took the prisoners to work in the colony.
Only two years later, it was discovered that A. Sakal did not belong to a prison in a strict regime colony, so the man was transferred to a regular regime colony in the Khabarovsk region of Russia’s Far East. Conditions were easier here, A. Sakalas first worked as a concrete worker, then as an electrician. But most importantly, if the labor rate in this field exceeds 121 percent. they were compensated for two days and exceeded 151 percent. – even three.
“The people who wrote the exit did not save us that percentage. This is how I “won” for three years and three months. I came back after sitting for five years without three months, “says A. Sakalas.
Released from the colony, A. Sakalas returned to Kaunas, where he completed his old Aušra gymnasium with a gold medal, although at the time it was called Komjaunimas High School. At a similar time, Sakal’s father wrote a complaint to the Moscow Prosecutor General’s Office requesting a reduction of the official sentence from 8 to 5 years and received a positive response. This formality meant a lot: A. Sakalas received a “clean” passport, so that he could study at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute.
Family relationships were also intertwined with V. Landsbergis
The family life of A. Sakal was not very simple either. The politician says that before the deportation, at the age of 17, he fell in love with a girl five years younger, wrote her letters from the camp, but for some reason he received no answers. After returning to Lithuania, he first visited his parents, and on the second trip he went to visit the girl of his dreams, who lived with his mother and brother. But the communication revealed that the girl is in love with another boy, she even showed a photo of him: “I didn’t say anything. You know what I could feel, so I left. “
And then, at a party, I met a doctor fifteen years older than me. Somehow I liked her a lot, she was a kind, single woman and I praised her ”, recounted for a moment the interlocutor about his first wife Bronislava.
However, the marriage of the first wife with whom the daughter Eglė was born was short-lived, and shortly thereafter A. Sakalas married V. Landsbergis’s ex-wife, Rita Kučinskaitė.
“At that time I had a lot of communication with the family and friends of V. Landsbergis. And the wife of V. Landsbergis somehow fell in love with me,” recalls the politician, recognizing at the same time that the sympathy was mutual.
When asked how his friend reacted at the time, A. Sakalas replied briefly, “I didn’t hear it then.” But he acknowledged there was a little less communication after that: “Probably just official communication. The friendship is over. “
A. Sakalas lived with his second wife for many years until her death in 2014. Together they had twins Rūta Sakalaitė and Paulius Sakalas, and also raised R. Sakalienė’s daughter from his first marriage, Jūratė Landsbergytė.
A. Sakalas recalls that once they both worked in the European Parliament, V. Landsbergis had to be reminded that his son needed help, because at that time his daughter Jūrate just needed help. However, Jūratė considers politics to be his daughter: for the third time, while marrying an independent journalist, Daiva Norkienė distributed his property to all the children: “When I divided the property, I divided it equally.”
The politician’s son, P. Sakalas, remembers that his father even saved his life twice. The man wrote a letter, which was posted to the portal with his permission by A. Sakal’s wife, Daiva. In the letter, P. Sakalas says that when he was about six years old, he did not dive into the water after White Lacquai Lake, although he did not know how to swim at all.
“Under the water, I found it very interesting that the crocodiles arrived early: there were hallucinations due to lack of oxygen. The grandmother on the shore began to scream, apparently noticing my disappearance, and my father came with lightning and saved me. I remember that I turned face down on the shore to let the water escape from my lungs ”, recalls the son of A. Sakal.
The next time after the severe flu, the son developed kidney inflammation and bleeding, so A. Sakalas not only found a good doctor, but also worked tirelessly during the holidays to provide the child with better food, watermelons than they washed the kidneys, taken to the Crimea for rehabilitation.
PHOTO GALLERY. Aloyzas Sakalas
He turned to politics by accident
When asked how he became a politician, A. Sakalas says that at that time there were simply groups of people who supported the transformation process started by the leader of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, called perestoika. The thirst for innovation was everywhere, even at Vilnius University, where A. Sakalas worked.
The meeting of the initiative group in June 1988 is seen as the beginning of the Lithuanian restructuring movement. The group consisted of 35 leading figures in science and art. A. Sakalas was not among them, but he became a board member of the Lithuanian Restructuring Movement and chairman of the Vilnius City Council.
“This is how I became a politician,” Sakalas explains briefly.
A. Sakalas, along with other colleagues, restored the modern Social Democratic Party in 1989 and did not change his political views several times. In 1991-1999, the politician led the party and opposed the merger with the LDDP. The need to unite the two parties arose because the Social Democrats were not very successful in the elections, at which point the LDDP sought to erase the image of the post-communist party.
“When there was a desire in the party to join the LDDP with the argument that the Social Democrats are like a useless cow without this party, I was against the merger because the LDDP was liberal and not the Social Democrats. I was opposed, I did not agree, so I had to leave the presidents, “recalls A. Sakalas.
When asked if he considered it a form of treason, the politician said in the mouth of a stone that he did not consider it: “No, I do not consider it a treason. Now I think maybe there was no other way. Only by failing to turn that new Social Democratic Party on the social democratic path did he approach the Liberals. “
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