“I” in “Lithuania in Crisis”
I
CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENTS IN INDEPENDENT LITHUANIA are broadly divisible into three periods, the democratic, the authoritarian, and the period of partial retreat from authoritarianism. The democratic period lasted from the reestablishment of the Lithuanian state in 1918 to the end of 1926. The authoritarian period followed and continued from 1927 until the early part of 1939. The last period started in March 1939 and ended with the destruction of Lithuania’s independence in June 1940. The socioeconomic setting in which these changes took place remained predominantly agricultural. Of the 3,080, 100 people, a 1938-1939 total which includes the Klaipeda and Vilnius areas, 2,352,400 or 76.4 per cent depended on the land for their livelihood and 727,700 or 23.6 per cent lived in small towns.
The Democratic Period
THE TEMPER OF MIND in postwar Lithuania was one of radicalism,1 and this radicalism of the democratic period was partly responsible for the onset of the second authoritarian period. Its probable sources were twofold: the proximity of revolutionary Russia and the psychology of an emergent Lithuania. For well over a century before World War I, Lithuania languished under the rule of Russian autocracy and the administration of Russian bureaucracy. The common people, who were Lithuania’s essence and the basis of her future national revival, had few rights and many obligations. The upper class was influenced by Polish culture, an influence whose origins date back to the time when Lithuania and Poland existed as a united state. The growing nationalistic intelligentsia viewed alien authority and the dearth of freedom as the two main causes of Lithuania’s plight under the tsars. Thus, in the reconstruction efforts after 1918, Lithuanians relied upon their native strength while seeking additional freedom. The result was a glorification of the common people, and it produced sweeping reforms of a political, social, and economic nature intended to restructure Lithuanian society. Radical proclivities were especially strong among those leaders who had lived in Russia before they returned home to work for an independent Lithuania. Many of them were affected by Russia’s revolutionary tradition and were prone to deal with problems in a radical way.
Postwar radicalism in economics occupied itself for the most part with land reform. Since about 76 per cent of Lithuania’s population depended on agriculture for its livelihood, the distribution of land was a matter of primary concern. About 40 per cent of all arable land belonged to a relatively small number of landowners, who were generally of Polish orientation and who frowned on the idea of an independent Lithuania. Outmoded methods used before 1918, which made farming inefficient, called for change on economic grounds. Lastly, Lithuanians hoped that redistribution of land would help them halt the advance of Russian Communist forces, which in 1919 held a large part of Lithuanian territory. These considerations invited a radical solution of the land problem, and all political parties were committed to such a course. Reforms were set in operation soon after the establishment of Lithuania’s independence. Land in excess of 80 hectares was expropriated, subject to compensation, and parceled out among small landholders and landless peasants. The character of the nation’s rural society thus underwent a fundamental change.
Postwar radicalism in politics led to an extreme form of democracy. Like other states in Central and Eastern Europe, Lithuania embraced ascendant parliamentary democracy as its form of government. Its political spectrum consisted of three main forces which originated in pre-independent Lithuania, the Catholics, the Populists, and the Social Democrats.
The Catholic bloc comprised one of the main forces in postwar politics. It consisted of three political parties, the Christian Democratic Party, the Farmers’ Union, and the Federation of Labor. At the core of the political structure was the Christian Democratic Party, which had assembled a considerable nationalist and Catholic following. The Party relied heavily on the Catholic clergy. Through them it succeeded in attracting a sizable number of women voters. It also found support among professional people. The Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Labor were weaker partners in the bloc. The Federation of Labor had little support among urban workers, it showed more strength among rural laborers and small landholders.
Rather than as separate parties, these three groups should be regarded as different branches of one political movement whose unifying factor was the Catholic Church. The stratagem of breaking into three parties was largely intended to attract supporters from every sector of the nation’s predominantly Catholic population. Catholic priests, most of whom were active in politics, impressed upon the faithful that it made no difference which group they supported at the polls, as long as they voted Catholic. In the Constituent Assembly elected in 1920 the Catholics had 59 deputies out of a total of 112.2
After the war Catholic leaders found themselves in a quandary. The radicalism of the democratic period made conservatism virtually synonymous with reaction and thus augured its defeat at the polls. Moreover, many Catholic politicians were relatively young men who had lived in Russia during the war and the revolution. The years they spent in that country left an imprint upon their attitudes and political behavior. These factors explain why Lithuania’s political Catholicism soon after the war was more progressive than it probably would have been under less disrupted conditions. However, of the three main political movements, the Catholic bloc was the least radical one.
The Populists formed the second main political force of the democratic period. They drew their strength largely from the rural population, especially from the small landholders, and attempted to represent their interests. In the elections of 1920 they won 29 of the 112 seats. The Populists were more radical than the Catholics but less radical than the Social Democrats. While their economic and social programs were not too different from those of the Catholics, basic ideological differences made cooperation difficult. The Populists expressed the sentiments of the liberal voters, especially those concerning relations between Church and State.
The Social Democratic Party was the most radical and least effective of the three main political movements. The Party’s attitude was so strict that it frowned on any sort of cooperation with the Catholics. The Social Democrats relied primarily on the urban workers for political strength and elected fourteen members to the Constituent Assembly. Members of the Party were also active in local government, where they scored considerable gains.
For a number of years after the war the Catholics dominated Lithuanian politics. However, by 1926 their influence had begun to decline, and in the elections held in May of that year the Catholics lost their majority of seats in the Seimas (Diet). What caused this Catholic reversal? In 1925 a concordat had been concluded between Poland and the Vatican which, in effect, recognized Poland’s interests as paramount in the unresolved conflict over Vilnius (Wilno or Vilna), a city and a territory held by Poland but claimed by both Poland and Lithuania. The ruling Christian Democrats’ failure to parry this diplomatic setback, their introduction of a spoils system, the evidence of corruption in the government, and the sagging economy were largely responsible for the Catholic defeat at the polls. Control of the government then devolved upon the Populists and the Social Democrats, who formed a leftist coalition.
Lithuania acutely felt the insufficient development of her political culture. The postwar years of social and political flux soon alienated many of the country’s conservatives and nationalists, who thought that factional strife exceeded permissible limits. Politics in Lithuania suffered from the prevailing tendency to view political issues from either an ideological or a religious point of view. Political parties were unduly concerned that their proposed solutions of concrete problems be fully consistent with their particular system of ideas. Such concern with ideology both delayed and depreciated compromise as an objective in politics. Further, the clergy were deeply involved in politics. The Social Democrats and the Populists treated Church officials, and the Church itself, as they did other political opponents, with little or no regard to the civilities conventionally shown to the ecclesiastical profession. Incessant and bitter party feuds made coalitions ephemeral.
Political conditions in Lithuania worsened when the Populists and the Social Democrats, who came to power in May 1926, began to implement their domestic programs. Measures which made the government distinctly unpopular in Catholic, nationalist, and military circles included the relaxation of restrictions on civil liberties, which resulted in an increase of Communist activities; the concessions which the coalition government had to make to the national minorities in order to win their support in the legislature; the removal from public service of a number of Catholic officials; the dismissal of some high officers from the army and plans to reduce the entire military establishment. In addition economic conditions failed to improve. Antanas Smetona, a prominent personality in the Lithuanian risorgimento and the republic’s first President, recounted the threatening specter of the period as seen by the conservatives:
The first interval . . . is the rule of all kinds of [political] parties, which proclaimed the widest possible freedom without discipline and harmony. By the end of 1926 that kind of freedom had brought our country to a point where the government was barely perceptible and where the promised freedom of each was preparing the bondage of all Lithuania. Under such conditions, the state treasury was getting empty, there appeared swarms of unemployed, [and] the Seimas was about to appropriate millions of lits3 for their aid. The interests of the farmers were forgotten, and dark mobs, led by Russianized chieftains, appeared in public . . . and insisted upon a Bolshevik government. Instead of jointly doing serious work, the Lithuanian parties in the Seimas wrangled constantly and allowed the national minorities to turn the helm of our state to and fro, as they saw fit. The entire country became uneasy; the Seimas and the government instituted by it became dejected, out of fear that it was giving in more and more to the unwholesome vagaries of impudent leaders. Men of obscurity threatened to deprive Lithuania’s peaceful and industrious inhabitants of their property and to treat them as people were treated in Russia. Things got to a point where the police were no longer permitted to maintain order. Work was failing in the country, everything was becoming inert. Our covetous [Polish] neighbor was already quietly looking forward to the day when, after the disappearance of our government and the spread of disorder, not only the Vilnius territory but all of Lithuania as well, as a long coveted booty, would fall to its share.4
Change was on the way. As Smetona observed, “the general public was anxiously waiting for someone to deliver it from that danger. Divine providence has not forsaken it: with the dawn of December 17 Lithuania entered a new age.”5
An Authoritarian Period
THE DAWN OF THE NEW AGE was the military coup d’etat of December 17, 1926, through which a group of army officers wrested political power from the constitutional authorities. The coup ended the first or democratic stage in the development of Lithuania’s political life and inaugurated the regime of Antanas Smetona.
Politically, President Smetona’s Nationalist government was restrictive. It eventually outlawed all political parties but one—the Lithuanian Nationalist Union. This intermediary between President Smetona and the general public had emerged in 1924 as a party which relied on the well-to-do farm population and the intelligentsia. At that time, however, it was a relatively unimportant group; it was not the numerical superiority of its followers, but the boldness of its leaders that brought the Nationalist Union to power. Economically, the Nationalist government pursued a cautious and conservative course. Its direction of rural economy conformed to the interests of the relatively affluent part of agrarian society, such as the landowner of average or large holding. Culturally, the Nationalist leaders intended to capitalize on those elements in Lithuania’s intellectual heritage which were distinctive in character. Smetona’s authoritarianism was essentially an antidote to the earlier experiment with parliamentary democracy. The Nationalist regime persisted in its efforts to discredit that type of democracy and crystallize its own political principles. In the end, these principles acquired a certain psychological and political affinity with those of Fascism.
The creation on March 27, 1939, of a coalition cabinet of Nationalists, Catholics,6 and Populists ushered in the third period in the politics of independent Lithuania. The formation of this government, known as the Černius government, forced the Nationalists to offer to the opposition concessions which tended to liberalize future political progress. Though of less consequence than the military revolt of 1926, the March realignment dealt a blow to Nationalist efforts to mold a monolithic society.
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