In the Lithuanian SSR and early independent Lithuania
Brazauskas held various positions in the government of Lithuanian SSR and Communist Party of Lithuania from 1965 onwards:
1965–1967, the minister of construction materials industry of Lithuanian SSR
1967–1977, deputy chairman of State Planning Committee of Lithuanian SSR.
1977–1987, secretary of Central Committee of Communist Party of Lithuania.
In the 1980s, he transformed himself from a Communist Party apparatchik to a moderate reformer. He was seen as cautious by nature, and when confronted by the tide of nationalist feeling in the Soviet Union, Brazauskas initially believed that the USSR might be reconstituted as a looser federation of independent, but communist, states. In seeing the tide of an independent democracy, he joined the reformist cause observing in 1990 that "We are realists now, and we cannot be propagating any utopian ideas. It's no secret [that] the Communist Party has a dirty history."
In 1988, he became the first secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania. Under his leadership, the majority of the Communist Party of Lithuania supported the Lithuanian independence movement, broke away from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and transformed itself into social-democratic Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania (now merged into the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party). Brazauskas was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from 15 January until 11 March 1990.
Though he sought to avoid a breach with Moscow in 1989, as leader of Lithuania's Communist Party, he formally severed the party's links with Moscow. This was rare in that no other local communist party organizations in the former Soviet Union dared to take this step. Some historians and journalists have later suggested that this act was the earliest certain indication of the inevitability of the demise of the Soviet Union.
After the 1992 parliamentary elections, the first since 1938, he became speaker of parliamentary and acting President of Lithuania on 25 November 1992. He then won the presidential election in a single round with 60 percent of the vote and was confirmed as president on 25 February 1993. He immediately suspended his membership in the Democratic Labour Party; the Constitution does not allow the president to be a formal member of a political party during his tenure.
