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VILNIUS, January 13, 2011 (AFP) - The Baltic nation of Lithuania marks the 20th anniversary Thursday of a bloody Soviet assault on its independence movement, a failed crackdown that sped the communist bloc's demise within a year.

The attack in the early hours of Sunday January 13, 1991, which claimed 14 lives and injured 700, remains scorched in the minds of Lithuanians.

"A tank rammed the barriers. Wild-eyed soldiers piled out and beat us with their rifle-butts," said kindergarten teacher Aurelija, 50.

"I was hit in the shoulder, pushed, manhandled, and suddenly I saw a woman crushed by the tank-tracks," Aurelija told AFP, declining to give her surname.

The victim was Loreta Asanaviciute, a factory worker aged 24 who became iconic as the only woman to die when troops moved on strategic sites held by the independence movement.

She and her fellow victims will be mourned in solemn ceremonies Thursday in this nation of 3.2 million, anchored in the West after joining NATO and the European Union in 2004.

"We didn't just defend our freedom. It was the day the Soviet empire collapsed," Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, 54, said this week. At the time, he was secretary of the "Sajudis" freedom movement, founded in 1988.

Like neighbouring Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviets during World War II and scarred by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of citizens to Siberia and Central Asia in the 1940s and 1950s.

The region remained solidly under Moscow's thumb until Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He began economic and political reforms which were to spiral out of control.

They paved the way for peaceful protests from 1987 known as the "Singing Revolution". In a region with a deep-rooted choral tradition, hundreds of thousands gathered to sing banned, patriotic anthems.

Dissidents gained ground across the communist bloc. Soviet satellite regimes in countries such as Poland and former East Germany crumbled in 1989.

On March 11, 1990, Lithuania became the first republic to secede from the Soviet Union, followed swiftly by Estonia and Latvia, and by others the following year.

When Lithuania refused to back down, Moscow imposed an economic blockade.

After that failed to bring the republic to heel, the Soviets tried force.

Troops began taking over key buildings on January 11, wounding several people as they fired on a crowd.

Breakaway Lithuania relied on tens of thousands of civilians who ringed the parliament, broadcast headquarters and main television transmission tower -- the latter was where the 14 died.

A section of the concrete barricades outside parliament remains as a memorial.

"On TV and in the papers there were calls to come and defend the buildings," architect Martynas Mankus, 38, then a student, told AFP. "I hoped it would end peacefully".

Academic and pianist Vytautas Landsbergis, declared Lithuania's head of state in 1990, spent the months before the crackdown touring the West in a bid to build support. He was holed up in parliament during the assault.

"Anyone doubting the need to defend their freedom and country is brainless," Landsbergis, 78 and a member of the European Parliament, said this week.

The troops pulled back, but too late to stem international outrage.

"It was the event that tipped Western public opinion. Up to then, the view was that we shouldn't hamper Gorbachev," Yves Plasseraud, a French expert on the region, told AFP.

A week later, a similar crackdown in Latvia killed at least seven.

And on July 31, seven members of Lithuania's security forces were shot at a border post.

Moscow finally recognised independent Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on September 6, a month after a failed coup by communist hardliners in the Soviet capital. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved three months later.

by Marielle Vitureau