“Warm on one side, cold on the other — Abišala,” people joked during the winter of 1992, when Russia cut off oil supplies to Lithuania and the country had to turn off heating. At the time, Prime Minister Aleksandras Abišala knew action was needed. He had to trust people, not instructions.

Thanks to business initiative, people were able to get heating. “If we had regulated everything, we would have stopped,” he says. “Free prices were the main tool that saved Lithuania.”

Abišala entered politics from a background in physics — not for a career, but because he could not stand aside. One decisive moment was organizing the Baltic Way — when he clearly felt for the first time that people could reach a goal if they worked together.

Together with other members of the Sąjūdis movement, he stepped into the unknown — risky, dangerous, but full of hope. Responsibility was taken not because of a position, but from within. And when he became one of the first ministers of independent Lithuania, he was guided by a strong belief: the state should not decide for people — especially when it is unable or unwilling to act.

In the podcast Beyond Economics and Back, former Prime Minister Aleksandras Abišala and the president of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI), Elena Leontjeva, discuss why leadership is about trust, not control — and why strong politics starts not from a position, but from backbone.