FOREWORD

THE HISTORY OF ANY NATION IS INTERESTING, because history is about people; and people, in their infinite variety, are a source of never-ending interest. To read about a nation concerning which we know little, and to find it coming into clearer definition as we focus upon its particular problems and its special qualities, is a fascinating experience. To most persons in the Western world Lithuania presents the vaguest sort of image, and the literature upon it available in English, or in any language widely read in the West, is meager and all too often biased. Mr. Sabaliūnas deserves our thanks for presenting a scholarly, thorough, and absorbing study of one of the most fateful chapters in the life of the Lithuanian nation: the disappearance of its short-lived second period of national independence.

But the author has done more than this. He has given us an admirably documented case-study of an important historical phenomenon of the twentieth century: the breakdown of the liberal-democratic regimes created or reorganized in Eastern Europe after the First World War. Set up in an effervescence of Wilsonian liberalism, almost all of them collapsed under a combination of internal and external pressures. By 1938, before the Soviet engorgement had begun, only two of the East European states, Finland and Czechoslovakia, still retained the free and democratic institutions which all the belt of small states between the Arctic and the Aegean had enjoyed, on paper at least, a decade and a half earlier. It was not, then, well-functioning Western-style democracies that the Soviet Union absorbed in 1940 or dominated at the end of the Second World War. What happened in this region between the Paris peace settlement and Munich is a matter deserving much more thorough study than it has yet received.

Lithuania, as one of the first of these countries to abandon its liberal institutions, is of special interest. The lack of any real moral authority, as the voice of the people, on the part of the authoritarian regime that succeeded the democratic form became clear in 1939 and 1940. In Chapters X and XI Mr. Sabaliūnas portrays the internal disarray of Lithuania in its last two years of independence: a weakness that prevented a real national opinion from expressing itself when the supreme crisis came.

In the final analysis it probably would not have made any difference what kind of government Lithuania had in the contest between Germany and the Soviet Union: the little nation would have been subjugated in any case by the winner. It is the historic misfortune of the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and the Poles to lie on the military highroad between Germany and Russia; and whether it was the Teutonic Knights and the ambitious Hanseatic burghers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or the Soviet politicians and military men in the twentieth century who took action, the interests of powerful neighbors have always overridden the rights and interests of the smaller peoples. The short-lived independence of the Baltic states in the twentieth century was made possible by the unusual fact that both Russia and Germany were losers in the First World War. As these two powers grew strong and a clash loomed between them, the chances that the small countries lying between them would be left alone vanished. Yet the loss of independence by the Baltic nations in 1940-1941 would have been more dignified and might have aroused deeper sympathy had these peoples been able to maintain, like Czechoslovakia, governments which could make a valid claim to representing their nations.

In his third chapter Mr. Sabaliūnas investigates the official nationalism of Lithuania in the years of dictatorship, and the reader finds himself listening to one more variation on a familiar theme. The rejection of foreign ways and ideas, including liberalism; the contempt for inept parliamentary democracy as an alien import; the emphasis on national will; the assertion that the whole should have unlimited precedence over the individual parts—all these traits reveal the same sort of “integral nationalism” that, in the case of larger nations, has received in recent years such enlightening studies as those by William Buthman, Michael Curtis, and Edward Tannenbaum for France and Fritz Stern and George Mosse for Germany. The theory of the “organic state,” which Mr. Sabaliūnas analyzes in its Lithuanian form, is familiar to us in the case of other countries from the studies by Eugen Weber, Hans Rogger, Marvin Rintala, and others. It is indeed true, as Mr. Sabaliūnas points out, that “Lithuania was a piece of the Continent.”

The principal part of our author’s study, however, is not concerned with the above-mentioned points. As the climax of his narrative Mr. Sabaliūnas tells us in detail of the process by which Lithuania was pushed into joining the Soviet Union. From this exposition it is clear that the Lithuanians were not permitted by their neighbor in the east to work out their problems in their own good time. The solution imposed on them was the Soviet solution. We may assume that the decision made in 1940 was a permanent one, at least for the foreseeable future. A quarter-century after the expulsion of the Nazis Lithuania is firmly integrated into the Soviet system, and a generation has grown up with constant instruction in Soviet values. To be sure, Lithuania is still Lithuania. The traveler who visits the well-kept-up baroque heart of Vilnius or delights in the clean modernism of architecture and design that has made present-day Lithuania “the Scandinavia of the Soviet Union” will certainly not think for a moment that he is in Russia. Yet whatever course the Lithuanian spirit and Lithuanian culture steer, they will have to remain within the warning buoys set up by Moscow.

Whether, in the long run, this fate is good or bad no one can say with certainty. One would be bold indeed to assert categorically that the narrow, arbitrary, bombastic regime in Lithuania in the 1930’s was superior to the present Communist state, which, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, has combined ruthless regimentation of thought and the methods of the police state with remarkable achievements in various aspects of life. It is conceivable that the Smetona regime might in time have permitted the development—or might have been pushed from below to yield to the development—of a more humane and free society than Lithuania had hitherto enjoyed, or enjoys at present. Chapters X, XI, XVI, and XVIII of the present study make it clear that such pressure from below existed, though it is equally clear that the Smetona government was able to resist the pressure until Soviet intervention weakened its position fatally. What possibilities for progressive change were latent in independent Lithuania must remain a matter for speculation. So must the question of whether a country as small and as poor in economic resources as Lithuania is a viable independent state in the twentieth century, quite aside from the problem of its military indefensibility against gigantic neighbors.

These remain theoretical questions. What does emerge from Mr. Sabaliūnas’ study is the bleak fact that in the two decades from 1920 to 1940 the Lithuanians, like the East Europeans in general throughout their history, had little opportunity to shape their own destinies and institutions. Ambitious, short-sighted, intolerant and incompetent leaders at home or ruthless expansionists next door have usually decided the fates of these peoples. This chapter in the long story is not very cheerful reading; but it is very instructive.

Indiana University CHARLES LEONARD LUNDIN