On a gray and cold Tuesday morning in Vilnius, Lithuania, a group of about 20 men in black business suits and fedoras entered a former broadcast station. They were escorted in by twice that number of soldiers.

Inside, the bullet-scarred walls had not yet been plastered over since the soldiers stormed the building four months ago. In fact, there were no plans to do so.

One of the business-suited men, a stocky, bald man with a prominent birthmark on his head, walked to a podium set up in the main studio and took out the text to a speech. While the soldiers lined the edges of the room, the rest of the men seated themselves facing the podium.

Today was the birthday of a great American who gave his life to preserve the unity of his country and the speaker fancied himself a kindred spirit to the man. In fact, the great man and his birthday were the inspiration for the speech.

As for the many differences between himself and the great man, the speaker either wasn’t aware of them or dismissed them as trifling and transient.

Besides, the speaker knew well that judgments of history fell to the victors of the struggle. And above all else, he was a winner, or at least, a survivor.

The speaker motioned to a soldier operating a video camera to begin taping and then began his speech:

“Three score and fourteen years ago our comrades brought forth on this continent a new political system, conceived in equality, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created socialist.

“Now we are engaged in a great counter-revolutionary struggle, testing whether our KGB, or any security police so conceived and so empowered, can long maintain order.

“We are met on a great flashpoint of that struggle. We have come to rededicate an organ of this insurrection, as a glorious monument for those who here took a few lives that the 1940 secret clauses might endure.

“Considering my popularity in Moscow lately, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot secure—we cannot reindoctrinate this ground. The brave comrades, who took over here, have secured it, according to the express wishes of our government’s great power to add or detract from the people’s rights.

“Thanks to Tass news agency and CNN, the world will note and long remember what I say here, even if our bourgeois enemies soon forget what we did here. It is for you the party leaders, then, to support me in the unfinished work which our agents here have thus far so nobly advanced.

“It is important for us to suppress domestic opposition to the great task remaining before us—that from this reprimanded republic we take increased submission to that cause for which we allocated the last full measure of our defense budget—that we here highly resolve that we have not soured our relations with the United States in vain …

“… that this government, under Marxist-Leninism, shall have a new birth of internal order—and that government of the Party, by the Party, for the Party, shall not perish from the earth.”

Just then, a small boy who had hidden in one of the smaller rooms when the men entered came into the studio, looked around the room and burst out laughing.