The open genocide of Lithuanians carried out in the first decades of the occupation thinned the ranks of enlightened individuals. To survive, a significant part of the nation was forced to adapt to the coercive system of the conquerors and make ideological and moral compromises. People often declared allegiance to the imposed system in order to foster their culture and defend their language in legal ways. There was hope that when conditions changed, the fading flame of rebellion would reignite in full force. In the 1960s and 1970s, the occupation authorities exercised a bit more caution as they continued to terrorise and persecute the population, violate human rights, and suppress national self-awareness. Their rule of “not blowing against the wind” led to social passivity, duality of personality, levelling of moral values and political immaturity. There was a risk of fully adapting and becoming an active cog of the communist machine, a mankurt without a Fatherland or a memory. Some people did not want to close their eyes – they couldn’t live this way and didn’t know how to adapt. Political prisoners and families of exiles returned to Lithuania. Persecuted by the KGB and subject to repression, the resistance was able to recover and fight. New underground organisations were formed in place of the ones that had been destroyed. In the changing world, the very methods of resistance and forms of protest were transforming. The inhuman Soviet system was strangling the empire itself and was being forced to open up to the world. Members of the nomenclature were allowed to visit other countries. The mostly pro-communist foreigners who came to the USSR had an opportunity to become acquainted with the “paradise” that was being created there. Some of them even made it to Lithuania, which was a particularly closed area (the people of Vilnius first saw these foreigners – who were like Martians to them – in 1957*). Lithuania’s relations with emigrants became closer and closer. No reinforced concrete walls or electronic interference could help the Soviet apparatchiks prevent the spread of free thought on foreign radio waves. The underground press reached Western radio stations, which rebroadcast to the whole world the desire for freedom clearly and directly expressed by the enslaved nations. The West could no longer not hear it and not react. Dissemination of anti-Soviet literature was punishable by imprisonment, but the occupation legal system did not provide any specific punishment for listening to the radio. The word of freedom reached thousands of listeners. It was accompanied by broadcast music. Jazz and rock were characterised by an enormous power of freedom and invited people to rise up.