On the night of January 12th I was on the eight floor of the RTV building. Before 1:30, people began to call to inform us about the approaching column of tanks. In ten minutes we could see them from the window. We turned off the lights and counted the tanks and trucks. There were 58 of them! But they didn't turn in our direction - they went towards Karoliniškės. Some twenty minutes had passed when two really loud shots rang out and a fire flashed up. After a few minutes we saw tanks from the window again. We counted 28 of them. Suddenly a terrible cannonade burst out by the door of the Radio building. I went downstairs and saw paratroopers with tommy guns. They ran towards me through the gallery. I stopped dead in my tracks. There were seven of them. A dark man of average height wearing a paratrooper's uniform and a black beret was leading them, but he didn't have a weapon or a helmet. They ran past me and rushed through the corridor of the first floor. I realized that they didn't know where the central apparatus room was because they ran in that direction instead of going up to the second floor. Later they ran through the main lobby on the first floor right into a dead-end corridor, so I don't think that anyone from our staff had collaborated with them. Nobody had shown them the way.
At first I couldn't understand why the paratroopers were throwing explosives and smoke bombs into the lobby, as it was completely empty. Only later did I realize that they had to make it look like a big battle. Later they said that a soldier had been shot on the second-floor stair landing, although later he miraculously appeared in the cafeteria. I can testify that there wasn't a corpse anywhere on the second-floor landing or in the corridor. The lobby was filled with a thick smoke. I went downstairs and saw a cameramen with his arms raised up. He didn't have his camera, but I know that he had hidden it in the first floor rest-room and was secretly filming. A paratrooper threw him outside. Umbrellas, gloves and scarves were thrown on the floor, and in the foyer there were batons from our policemen. One of them was bent in half.
The partition for the policeman on duty was broken. The paratroopers had dragged desks from the room to block themselves from the people. The people! The glass porch was filled with them. Everyone was shouting: “Fascists, fascists!" Three paratroopers were standing by the table and shooting their guns in the air. Suddenly the one in the middle screamed to the people: “Uchodite, uchodite! Streliaju bojevimi patronami!" (“Leave! Leave! I'm shooting real bullets!") Then he pulled out one cartridge clip and put in another. One policeman was pushed out of the Center without his overcoat. On his left side, blood was dripping through his shirt. The upper part of his arm was bloody too.
There were about two hundred people on and near the stairs. Paratroopers forced them off the porch, lined up on the stairs, and kept firing into the air. A light tank shot at the spotlight in the yard. It went out, but the yard was still lit up by the two spotlights on the roof of the porch and by the horrible fight - there were tracer bullets and explosives everywhere. Now and then you could hear the rumble of tanks or the shattering of windows, and in the background of this cacophony a voice blared: “Brothers, sisters! We are the democratic authority of the working class and we don't want violence... Disperse..."
The crowd didn't move. Suddenly three light tanks started moving in our direc¬tion. The one in the middle came straight at us. We realized that it was going to crush us, so we moved out of our way. The tank drove up to the fence, pulled out a section of it, and went through. The street was lit up, and searchlights cut through the sky. People crowded on the other side of the street.
Lithuania, 1991.01.13 : documents, testimonies, comments. - Vilnius : State Publishing Center, 1992, p. 180-181.