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W 'ip ? E S Lithuania, 1992 © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Germany and the Soviet Union as part of an anti-Versailles camp. In 1939, by the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union were to divide Eastern Europe, and Lithuania fell into the Soviet orbit. In 1940 Soviet forces overthrew the authoritarian regime that had ruled Lithuania since 1926, and Moscow directed the country’s incorporation into the Soviet Union as a constituent republic.
The 1940s brought destruction and havoc to Lithuania. In 1940 and 1941, Soviet authorities deported thousands of Lithuanian citizens of all nationalities into the interior of the USSR. When the Germans invaded in 1941, some local people joined with the Nazi forces in the massacre of the vast majority of the Jewish population of Lithuania. (In 1940 and 1941 Jews had constituted almost 10 percent of Lithuania’s population.) When the Soviet army returned in 1944 and 1945, Lithuanian resistance erupted and continued into the early 1950s. Thousands died in the fighting, and Soviet authorities deported at least 150,000 persons to Siberia. (The exact number of killings and deportations is subject to considerable dispute.)
Under Soviet rule the Lithuanian social structure changed significantly. Before World War II,
LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH
the majority of Lithuanians were peasants, and even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many urban dwellers still maintained some sort of psychological link with the land. The Soviet government, however, collectivized agriculture and pushed industrialization, moving large numbers of people into the cities and developing new industrial centers. By the 1960s, after the violent resistance had failed, more Lithuanians began to enter the Soviet system, becoming intellectuals, economic leaders, and party members. Emigr? Lithuanian scholars often estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of Lithuanian party members were “believers,” while the majority had joined out of necessity.
In 1988, after Mikhail Gorbachev had loosened Moscow’s controls throughout the Soviet Union, the Lithuanians became a focus of the process of ethno-regional decentralization of the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s program of reform encouraged local initiative that, in the Lithuanian case, quickly took on national coloration. The Lithuanian Movement for Perestroika, now remembered as Sajudis, mobilized the nation first around cultural and ecological issues, and later, in a political campaign, around the goal of reestablishment of independence.
Gorbachev quickly lost control of Lithuania, and he successively resorted to persuasion, economic pressure, and finally violence to restrain the Lithuanians. After the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence of the Soviet party in December 1989, worldwide media watched Gorbachev travel to Lithuania in January to persuade the Lithuanians to relent. He failed, and after Sajudis led the Lithuanian parliament on March 11, 1990, to declare the reconstitution of the Lithuanian state, Gorbachev imposed an economic blockade on the republic. This, too, failed, and in January 1991, world media again watched as Soviet troops attacked key buildings in Vilnius and the Lithuanians passively resisted Moscow’s efforts to reestablish its authority. The result was a stalemate. Finally, after surviving the so-called “August Putsch” in Moscow, Gorbachev, under Western pressure, recognized the reestablishment of independent Lithuania. See also: BRAZAUSKAS, ALGIRDAS; LANDSBERGIS, VYTAU-TAS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; POLAND; VILNIUS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eidintas, Alfonsas, and Zalys, Vytautas. (1997). Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918-1940. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Misiunas, Romuald, and Taagepera, Rein. (1992). The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990, expanded and updated ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1959). The Emergence of Modern Lithuania. New York: Columbia University Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1990). Lithuania Awakening. Berkeley: University of California Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Vardys, V. Stanley. (1978). The Catholic Church, Dissent, and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania. Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly.
(1876-1951), old Bolshevik, leading Soviet diplomat, and commissar for foreign affairs.
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was born Meer Genokh Moisevich Vallakh in Bialystok, a small city in what is now Poland. He joined the socialist movement in the 1890s and sided with Vladimir Lenin when the Social Democratic Party split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. From 1898 to 1908, he smuggled guns and propaganda into the empire, but having achieved little, he emigrated to Britain. There he married an English woman and led a quiet, conventional life, even becoming a British subject. During the October Revolution, he served briefly as the Soviet representative to London but was expelled from Britain for “revolutionary activities” in October 1918. In Moscow he became a deputy commissar for foreign affairs and frequently negotiated with the Western powers for normal diplomatic relations, to little success. However, Litvinov did conclude a 1929 nonaggression pact with the USSR’s western neighbors, including Poland and the Baltic states.
From 1930 to 1939 Litvinov served as commissar for foreign affairs. In 1931 he negotiated a nonaggression treaty with France, an extremely anti-Soviet state that had become worried about an increasingly unstable Germany. Soon after Adolf Hitler came to power, Litvinov initiated alliance talks with France, finding a partner in Louis Bar-thou, the foreign minister. In December 1933, the Soviet Communist Party leadership formally approved Litvinov’s proposal both for a military alliance with France and for the Soviet Union’s
LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT
entrance into the League of Nations. Talks took a tortuous course, but in June 1934, Barthou and Litvinov agreed on a eastern pact of mutual assistance that would be guaranteed by a separate Franco-Soviet treaty of mutual assistance.
For several reasons, however, these treaties proved ineffectual. First of all, Barthou was assassinated in October 1934, and Pierre Laval, an advocate of good relations with Germany, replaced him. Moreover, the British were hostile to close relations with Moscow, and France was generally unwilling to act without London’s support. Finally, in 1937, Stalin ordered the decimation of the Red Army’s leadership at the same time he was terrorizing the entire nation. To the already suspicious West, it seemed clear that the USSR could not possibly be a reliable ally. Litvinov realized the damage the Great Terror wrought on Soviet foreign policy but was powerless in domestic politics. Ignored and rebuffed at virtually every turn by the West, Litvinov was replaced by Stalin’s close associate, Vyacheslav Molotov, in May 1939, four months before the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
With the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Stalin appointed Litvinov ambassador to the United States. For the next two years, Litvinov constantly urged the West to open a second front in France. Angered at Litvinov’s lack of success, Stalin recalled him in 1943. He served as a deputy commissar for foreign affairs, making many proposals to Stalin advocating Great Power cooperation after the war. This effort failed, and Litvinov eventually understood that Stalin saw security not in terms of cooperation with the West, but in the building of a bulwark of satellite states on the USSR’s western border. Two months before his final dismissal in August 1946, Litvinov told the American journalist Richard C. Hottelet that it was pointless for the West to hope for good relations
