VII

URBAN CONDITIONS

AT THE END of two decades of independent existence, nearly a quarter of the Lithuanian population lived in expanding urban communities. In 1939-1940, despite noticeable unemployment, housing shortages, and other hardships attendant upon rapid development, the cities continued to attract sizable numbers of new residents. Their annual rate of population increase amounted to 3 per cent, with internal migration responsible for 2 per cent.

The absence of comprehensive family living studies¹ makes impossible any precise analysis of the conditions of life. However, the growth of a middle class in the towns was attended by a parallel augmentation of low-income groups, industrial laborers, craftsmen, petty white collar workers, the unemployed and the underemployed. Low wages, partly revealed by Table 12, and the distressingly high cost of living guaranteed a bleak future for these urban residents. The bulk of their precarious means of existence consisted of earnings by the head of the household; income from subsidiary employment came to an insignificant amount.

Increased Cost of Living

IN THE YEARS before World War II the real standard of living had been undermined by the progressive disparity between labor income and the cost of living. The war months, as shown by index numbers reflected in Table 13, only accelerated this trend. In order to offset the marked rise in the cost of living, early in 1940 the government decided to raise workers’ salaries by 5 to 15 per cent and to award a single winter bonus.² However, this additional income did not materially affect the 34 per cent increase in the cost of living which had occurred since the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939.

TABLE 13
Index Numbers of Cost of Living
1929 = 100

Source: League of Nations, Economic Intelligence Service, Statistical Year-Book of the League of Nations, 1939/1940 (Geneva, 1940), p. 210.

The state of the national economy weighed heavily upon the common wage earners. This is well illustrated by Table 14, which lists the monthly minimum cost of living for single adults and for families of two and five. Particularly pertinent to the living conditions of urban labor are the considerably higher averages reproduced in Table 15. The two tables, along with the available income figures, indicate the difficult circumstances of the ordinary worker. Some employees, especially the skilled ones, earned a tolerable living. But others were reduced to poverty as their real incomes did not keep pace with the rapid rise in the cost of living. This statistical profile is substantiated by contemporary accounts. In the winter of 1939 the Catholic XX Amžius (Twentieth Century) had reported on the living conditions of a typical family of five. The head of the household was a public works employee paid 6 lits a day, a wage above the average 4.50 lits in this category. The national minimum cost of living for a family of five amounted to 173 lits monthly. The monthly salary of this worker was 156 lits, which approximated the Kaunas wages for unskilled labor, 149 lits. Even with slightly better-than-average earnings, his income fell considerably short of the requirements for meeting the minimum urban cost of living, especially since the urban minimum for a family of five was higher than the national estimate. To make both ends meet, the laborer was constrained to work hard and to restrict the purchase of food as much as possible.³

TABLE 14
The Monthly Minimum Cost of Living in Lithuania

(In Lits)

Source: Statistikos Biuletenis, nos. 5-6 (May-June 1940), p. 53.

TABLE 15
The Monthly Minimum Cost of Living for a Single Adult in Selected Cities and the Urban Average

(In Lits)

Source: Statistikos Biuletenis, No. 7 (July 1940), p. 82.

Besides the soaring cost of living, the war caused other discomforts for the average wage earner. Shortages of raw materials impelled a number of firms to cut down production and to reduce employee working hours. It is, however, next to impossible to evaluate these over-all losses.⁴

Housing Shortages

AN UNUSUALLY SEVERE URBAN PROBLEM was the shortage of housing, especially in Kaunas. Rents in that city, sometimes 100 or 120 lits a month for a single room, were thought by some to have been among the highest in the world. Not infrequently soaring rents absorbed as much as 50 per cent of workers’ earnings.⁵ Like many other sectors of the national economy, home construction was in the domain of free enterprise, unregulated by governmental control. Twenty years of progress in urban construction was climaxed in 1938-1939 by record investment totals, as shown in Table 16. Ultimately, however, such construction only benefited the prosperous urbanites, since it proved to be beyond the reach of the many impecunious citizens who wished to settle in towns. Thus, urban construction failed to meet the demands generated by internal migration, and the poor were forced to seek shelter in substandard quarters on the outskirts of urban communities.

TABLE 16
Investment in Urban Construction

(In Thousands of Lits)

Source: Economic and General Bulletin, no. 1 (January 1940), p. 11.

In 1939 the Kaunas municipal authorities resolved to grapple with the housing problem. The Mayor summoned the City Council to a session and demanded action. In a grotesquely inadequate proposal which would have been funny had it not been tragic, the Mayor petitioned the councilmen to alleviate the housing shortage by appropriating funds for the construction of four small houses, to be rented to the impoverished laborers. One member took the floor to confess that so ineffectual a resolution was hypocrisy. He was apprehensive lest the proposed measures, evidence of “remorse of conscience” and nothing more, embarrass the Council before the public. However, the unperturbed majority of municipal leaders voted in favor of the Mayor’s “relief” program.⁶

In accordance with a cabinet instruction of May 30, 1939, the Committee of Construction opened an investigation into the housing situation. It set up a special commission whose procrastinations caused it to outlive the last two governments of independent Lithuania. The commission reached the decision that the solution to the problem needed more studying, more planning, more preparation. In addition to these findings, the investigators recommended the following extraordinary measures to expedite “social construction”: construction of living quarters for workers, craftsmen, and petty white collar employees, adoption of incentive credit policies, relief from real estate taxes, and a program of mass construction of inexpensive workers’ colonies.⁷ If not too little, these suggestions were surely too late. When the Russians descended on their Baltic neighbors in 1940, they found a swarm of workers’ families subsisting in far-off huts, barracks, and basements and a score of other people studying their travail.

The laborers, like the small landholders and the new settlers who profited from postwar land reforms, remained unprotected against the powerful competitors for credit. As in agriculture, there was genuine public concern, but the administration neglected to act vigorously. Failure to solve the housing problem was one of the more conspicuous gaps in the record of the Lithuanian regime.

Unemployment, Public Works, and Relief

UNEMPLOYMENT was yet another major difficulty. Because of seasonal work, temporary part-time occupations, restrictions on the registration of the unemployed, and a wide divergence in the unemployment figures quoted in nationalist and Communist sources, any attempt to ascertain the jobless total accurately is hazardous. It is only necessary to point out that estimates for June 1, 1940, range from 22,657 cited by nationalist sources to 76,452 in Communist sources.⁸ The figures seem to have excluded the Vilnius area, which Lithuania regained in 1939. According to its Mayor, Vilnius had some 15,000 jobless workers in the first part of 1940.⁹ Keeping in mind the exclusion from the files of registered unemployed of all newcomers who had lately left the provinces and all urban residents who had not lived in the cities for three consecutive years, nationalist estimates tend to be markedly conservative¹⁰; the Communist ones, though somewhat inflated, are probably closer to the facts.

Another indication of the worsening trend in the labor situation is the information concerning public works. During the first six months of 1940, between 6,000 and 9,000 laborers were supplied jobs at various public works projects,¹¹ and it was hoped that eventually as many as 11,000 unemployed could be aided in this manner.¹² Moreover, government sources estimated in March that expenditures on public works in 1940 would amount to 8,269,640 lits, an increase of 57 per cent over 1939. The acquisition of eastern Vilnius districts and the rise in unemployment as a result of the wartime slump in production were believed to have been responsible for so noticeable an expansion of emergency measures. Expenditures could have increased further, for it was not at all unusual for the legislators to use their original appropriations for unforeseen needs at a later date. Just such an increment for public works in 1939 made up 33 per cent of the original allowance. The money would have financed yearlong projects envisaged for every district, with the Vilnius area alone using up 3,757,500 lits.¹³ Another means of relief, providing work for some 25,000 people, was lumbering. However, the bulk of those who benefited from lumbering were small landholders, and it is not at all clear how many of them were urban laborers.¹⁴

Besides creating jobs for the idle workmen, public authorities were constantly searching for other solutions, short of radical reforms, to alleviate the sufferings of the society’s unfortunates. Sporadic measures such as the preliminary sketch of a social assistance act, the sale of fuel at lower prices, and the possibility of allocating city jobs to those who needed them were intended to ameliorate the worker’s lot.

Along with relief programs administered by the government, several civic groups volunteered their services in assisting destitute nationals. Cumulative data concerning such civic measures are not available ; however, national news reports give reason for presuming that they were extensive and substantial. Local Catholic and citizens’ organizations were active in succoring workers with large families, providing the poverty-stricken with free medical care, clothing, and housing, helping those parents who needed such aid to educate their children, and assisting the elderly and the beggars. These social organizations tried, as best they could, to lift the poor out of their squalor. But their means fell short of the need, and the over-all tangible effects proved to be negligible. The conventional relief approach initiated by the government did not have any noticeable effect on the condition of labor. Discontent mounted. “With a heavy heart I must confess that I had hoped to see better living conditions in my native state,” lamented a laborer who in 1918 volunteered to fight for his country. “We, workers, are not looked upon as human beings. It is impossible for us to read newspapers, to find out what is really going on. Everybody is making fools of us. Some life we have!”¹⁵ Gradually the depressed life of the worker alienated him from the sense of community. It was feared that in the absence of forceful measures to improve his lot, “love of one’s country,” pride in its “glorious past,” and other civic virtues would be undermined. The four political parties responded to these economic and social grievances in different ways. The Nationalists were dilatory, the Catholics and the Populists occasionally exposed bad conditions, but only the Communists for their own reasons viewed them in all their seriousness.