The room smelled of old paper, wax, and nervous sweat. The sound was a murmur of Lithuanian, the scratch of pens, the heavy thud of official seals being pressed into hot red wax. The Supreme Council of the Lithuanian SSR was voting itself out of existence. The men and women at the desks were not revolutionaries in the street; they were deputies, many of them former Communist Party members, performing a legislative act. They were repealing the 1940 declarations that had absorbed Lithuania into the USSR and reinstating the independent republic.
To be there was to feel the surreal tension between procedure and revolution. Every stroke of the pen was an act of defiance that could invite Soviet tanks. The air was thick with the scent of the sealing wax—a traditional, almost archaic touch for a document of such seismic modern consequence. The sound of that seal breaking away from the paper was a tiny, crisp snap in the quiet chamber. It was a sound of finality. Outside, people gathered, but inside it was all paperwork and pounding hearts. The declaration was a piece of paper. Its power lay in the collective decision to treat it as if it were already true, to make the record of the state match the will of its people, one stamp at a time.