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The 20th anniversary of the re-establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was marked on September 8th at he U.S. Department of State with participation of the diplomatic corp, representatives of the US Congress and administration, and leadres of the local Baltic communities. A photo exhibit was opend during the event that portray the struggles and triumphs experienced by the Baltic peoples during their long struggle for independence. "They are a pictoral reminder of the heroism and resilience of each country's citizens as they wotked to regain the freedom they so richly deserve. We celebrate in this exhibit twenty years of renewed relationships as allies, partners, and - most importantly-friends", - said US Department of State in its announcement. Bellow is the text of Viktoras Nakas, 1991-1993 Political/Press Officer of the Embassy of Lithuania, delivered on behalf of the Embassy of Lithuania at the event:

"I would like to begin by thanking Lithuanian Ambassador Zygimantas Pavilionis for inviting me to present a Lithuanian perspective at today’s celebration. It is a great honor. I speak as someone with feet planted in two camps – one here in the land of my birth; the other in my ancestral homeland.

Today, we celebrate a number of things. Foremost is the fearless determination with which the Baltic peoples reestablished their independence beginning in March 1990. When the day of reckoning came in August 1991 as Kremlin reactionaries attempted to crush the democratization movement, the Baltics stood firm. I remember reading a newspaper account while the putsch was underway. The article identified five places in the Soviet empire that the reactionaries had to gain control of to ensure the success of their coup. One was Moscow. A second was St. Petersburg. The other three you can guess. To put it another way, two Russian cities and three Baltic states were the places where the best hopes for democratization resided. Yeltsin standing atop a tank in Moscow was critically important to the success of the democrats. But neither Yeltsin nor Moscow comes anywhere near to constituting the whole story.

So today we give thanks to the Baltic peoples for their role in freeing themselves and contributing to the liberation of the nations that constituted the former Soviet republics. I would like to recognize in a special way three sets of people.

The first are the Lithuanian citizens who sought refuge in the forests of their country in 1944 as the Soviet troops returned to resume their occupation. At the cost of tens of thousands of lives, these partisans fought an eight-year war in defense of their homeland before they were finally defeated.

The second group comprises those Lithuanian political prisoners who continued to press for political and religious freedom into the 1970s and 80s. They endured years of incarceration in labor camps but refused to be silenced.

And the third group – the smallest – were the diplomats of the first Lithuanian republic. In 1940 they found themselves stranded in the West without a country. But they soldiered on through World War II, the Cold War and détente.

Though these three groups suffered in different ways and to different degrees, all shared this in common: they were ridiculed and their cause was dismissed as futile. Nevertheless each of them kept faith with the ideal of Lithuanian independence.

Their struggle was not pointless. Though most didn’t live to see that day 20 years ago when World War II truly ended for the Baltic states, when all was said and done these partisans, political prisoners and diplomats were the victors. They – along with Lithuanians in the diaspora – steadfastly nurtured the Lithuanian people’s national consciousness. When the conditions became ripe in 1987, their cumulative efforts contributed to a movement for independence that was broad and deep. Theirs was the victory of idealism over pragmatism.

The battle between these two forces — idealism and pragmatism— played out in various ways in Washington. It cut across party lines.  At a White House meeting it nearly led to a fistfight between two cabinet secretaries.

To the chagrin of many Lithuanian Americans, when the August putsch failed and the USSR began to implode, the United States was not among the first countries to extend diplomatic recognition to the democratic government of independent Lithuania. At the time it was a bitter pill to swallow.

But it should not obscure a more important reality. For five decades no country did more than the United States to uphold the right of the Baltic nations to be independent. Had the United States abandoned the policy refusing to recognize the absorption of the Baltic states into the USSR, that policy would have withered away everywhere else. Baltic diplomats working in exile would have lost their lifelines. Instead decades after the Iron Curtain had descended on Europe, the United States took small but important measures to strengthen its non-recognition policy.

Had the U.S.-sponsored radios – Voice of America and RFE/RL  – not existed, the Lithuanian people would have been deprived of a critical source of information about what was really occurring in the world. They would have been denied the multiple inputs that fed their hope and national consciousness – from interviews with their great literary figures living in exile, to news about underground publications smuggled out of Lithuania, to recitations of Congressional letters to Soviet officials upholding Lithuania’s human and national rights.

The impulse toward doing what is morally right runs deep among the American people. True, it is sometimes overwhelmed by an impulse to be pragmatic. But one of the reasons among many that the Baltic states are free is that, as regards them, American idealism has played a consequential role. I think it is a quality that many people in Lithuania recognize and are grateful for. By contributing to the peaceful and just conclusion of the Cold War, the idealistic impulse has served America well."