Gorbachev in August 1991, but he vigorously denied charges of direct involvement in these events. See also: ANDREYEVA, NINA ALEXANDROVNA; AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GLASNOST; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PERESTROIKA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harris, Jonathan. (1989). “Ligachev on Glasnost and Per-estroika.” In Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 706. Pittsburgh, PA: University Center for Russian and East European Studies. Ligachev, Egor. (1993). Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin. New York: Pantheon Books.
Yegor Ligachev was a leading orthodox critic of many aspects of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of reforms. From 1985 until late 1988 he served as the party’s informal second secretary responsible for the supervision of official ideology and personnel management. During this period, he clashed with Secretary Alexander Yakovlev over cultural and ideological policies and openly assailed the cultural liberalization fostered by glas-nost and the growing public criticism of the USSR’s past.
While Ligachev publicly endorsed perestroika in general terms, he opposed Gorbachev’s efforts to limit party officials’ responsibilities and to expand the legislative authority of the soviets. He was widely identified with the orthodox critique of perestroika provided by Nina Andreyeva in early 1988. At the Nineteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in mid-1988, Ligachev refused to publicly endorse Gorbachev’s reform of the Secretariat and its subordinate apparat. In September 1988 he lost his position as second secretary and was named director of the newly created agricultural commission of the Central Committee.
LIKHACHEV, DMITRY SERGEYEVICH
(1906-1999), cultural historian, religious philosopher.
Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev was known as a world-renowned academic, literary and cultural historian, sociologist, religious philosopher, prisoner of the gulag, and preservationist of all kinds of Russian culture. But he was much more. By the end of his life he had become one of the most respected citizens of Russia. As an academic, Likhachev was the preeminent expert of his generation on medieval Russian culture, and the literature of the tenth through seventeenth centuries in particular, perhaps the most prolific writer and researcher on Russian culture in the twentieth century. One of his obituaries described him as “one of the symbols of the twentieth century . . . [whose] life was devoted to education . . . the energetic service of the highest ideals of humanism, spirituality, genuine patriotism, and citizenship . . . consistently preaching eternal principles of moralLITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS ity and conscientiousness . . . a person of the rarest erudition and generous spirit, who educated a whole galaxy of worthy students” (Kultura No. 36, 7-13 October, 1999, 1). Another said, “[He] took the helm of the ship of Russian culture and steered it to a hopefully better world.” He was a greatly talented historian and many of his more than one thousand publications were known throughout the world’s academic community. By his life’s end he had been granted honorary titles by sixteen national academies and European universities, as well as several high honors from his native land, including Hero of Soviet Labor. He served as a researcher in various Soviet academic institutions of renown, gained the title of university professor, and for his seminal work on the Russian classic, Lay of Igor’s Campaign, was received into the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His very active life also led him to membership in the Russian Duma after the fall of the Soviet Union. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; HISTORIOGRAPHY; LAY OF IGOR’S CAMPAIGN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Likhachev, Dmitry S. (2000). Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press.
LISHENTSY See DISENFRANCHIZED PERSONS.
Located on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, Lithuania has been an independent republic since 1991. Encompassing 66,200 square kilometers, it has a population (2001) of 3,491,000 inhabitants, of whom 67.2 percent live in cities and 32.8 percent in rural areas. Over 80 percent of the population is Lithuanian, about 9 percent Russian, and 7 percent Polish.
Lithuanians first established a government in the thirteenth century to resist the Teutonic Knights attacking from the West. In 1251 the Lithuanian ruler Mindaugas accepted Latin Christianity, and in 1253 received the title of king, but his successors were known as Grand Dukes. When Tatars overran the Russian principalities to the East, the Grand Duchy expanded into the territory that today makes up Belarus and Ukraine. At its height, at the end of the fourteenth century, although the Lithuanians are a Baltic and not a Slavic people, Lithuania had a majority of East Slavs in its population, and for a time it challenged the Grand Duchy of Moscow as the “collector of the Russian lands.”
Faced by Moscow’s growing strength, Lithuanian leaders turned to Poland for help, and through a series of agreements made between 1385 and 1387, the two states formed a union, solidified by the marriage of the two rulers, Jagiello and Jadwiga, and by the reintroduction of Latin Christianity through the Polish structure of the Roman Catholic church. (Lithuania had reverted to paganism after Mindaugas’s abdication in 1261.) Reinforced by the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continued until the Partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1795 the Third Partition of Poland brought Russian rule to most of what today constitutes Lithuania.
Russian authorities attempted to wean the Lithuanians from the Polish influences that had dominated during the period of the Commonwealth. The Russians banned the use of the name “Lithuania” (Litva) and administered the territory as part of the “Northwest Region.” After the Polish uprisings of 1831 and 1863, the authorities helped Lithuanians in some ways but also tried to force them to adopt the Cyrillic alphabet. At the same time, the authorities limited the economic development of the region, which lay on the Russian-German border. Under these conditions, a Lithuanian national consciousness emerged, and with it the goal of cultural independence from the Poles and eventual political independence from Russia.
The Lithuanians received their opportunity in the course of World War I. On February 16, 1918, after almost three years of German occupation, the Lithuanian Council (Taryba) declared the country’s independence, but a provisional government began to function only after the German defeat in November 1918. Russian efforts in 1919 to reclaim the region in the form of a Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic failed, and in May 1920 a Constituent Assembly met and formalized the state structure.
The First Republic’s foreign policy focused on Lithuania’s claim to the city of Vilnius as its historic capitol. The Poles had seized the city in 1920, and as a result, Lithuania tended to align itself with
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