Lithuania

D

World War II Occupation

In June 1940 the Soviet Red Army invaded Lithuania. Smetona fled the country, and a new pro-Soviet government was installed. Only the Communist Working People’s Bloc, a party organized and led by Soviet communists, was allowed to participate in the parliamentary elections held in July. The following month Lithuania formally became the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), a constituent republic of the USSR. However, the United States and other democratic powers refused to recognize the legality of the Soviet annexation.

Despite the earlier nonaggression pact, Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941. Large-scale anti-Soviet uprisings then took place in Lithuania. Unable to contend with both the revolt and the German onslaught, Soviet forces withdrew from Lithuania. During the Nazi occupation, Lithuanian resources were systematically pillaged and more than 200,000 Lithuanians, including an estimated 165,000 Jews, were killed. The Nazis nearly exterminated the entire Jewish population, which had constituted Lithuania’s largest minority group before the war (the see Holocaust).

In the summer of 1944 the Soviets reoccupied most of Lithuania and reestablished it as a Soviet republic; however, the Germans held out in western Lithuania until early 1945. Under the Soviets, all noncommunist social and political organizations were prohibited. Only the Communist Party of Lithuania (CPL), a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the party that replaced the Communist Working People’s Bloc after Lithuania’s 1940 elections, was allowed to function.

E

Communist Control

In the late 1940s the Soviet regime abolished private ownership of land, and all of Lithuania’s farmland was incorporated into large state-controlled farms. The regime also closed most of Lithuania’s churches, deported many priests, and prosecuted people who were openly religious. Strong resistance against the Soviet occupation lasted until 1952 and involved more than 100,000 people. Soviet officials sent as many as 350,000 Lithuanians to labor camps in Siberia as punishment for holding anti-communist beliefs or resisting Soviet rule. Lithuania settled into relative calm in the mid-1950s, and most nations tacitly accepted its status as a Soviet republic.

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Rapid industrialization, a high priority of Soviet economic policy, began in Lithuania in the late 1950s. The influx of workers into Lithuania’s cities transformed the traditionally agrarian society into a predominantly urbanized one. New industrial workers also included Russians and other Soviet immigrants, although Lithuania was less affected by immigration than its Baltic neighbors. Russian immigrants were at first disproportionately represented in the CPL, but in the 1950s and 1960s more Lithuanians joined the ranks of the Lithuanian party apparatus. Antanas Sniečkus, a native-born Lithuanian, continuously held the highest post of CPL first secretary from the 1940s until 1974.

In the 1960s and 1970s an extensive movement developed in Lithuania in opposition to Soviet rule. In May 1972 many Lithuanian students and workers held demonstrations in Kaunas calling for religious and political freedom. The opposition movement also began producing a number of underground anticommunist publications, including a prominent publication called The Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church.

In the mid- and late 1980s rapid political changes in Eastern Europe and the USSR created a new political climate that strengthened Lithuanian nationalism. In the USSR these changes resulted from the political and economic reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s calls for glasnost (Russian for “openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) led to the formation of thousands of nationalist groups throughout the USSR.

In Lithuania, a special commission was formed in 1988 to propose amendments to the republic’s constitution in order to accommodate Gorbachev’s reforms; members of the commission founded the coalition Sjūdis (the Lithuanian Movement for Reconstruction). The CPL lost its monopoly on power in 1989, as other political parties were allowed to function, and in February 1990 candidates aligned with Sjūdis won an overall majority in Lithuania’s first open parliamentary elections. The new governing coalition led the struggle for Lithuanian independence. During this period, the CPL broke with the CPSU, a move that aided the CPL’s later resurgence.

In March 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare the restoration of its independence. A public referendum overwhelmingly approved the move a year later. However, the USSR used economic, political, and military pressure to keep Lithuania within the union. Then in August 1991 the CPSU lost all credibility after a failed coup attempt by communist hard-liners in Moscow, and in September the Soviet government conceded the independence of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. All three Baltic republics were admitted to the United Nations (UN) later that month. The USSR officially ceased to exist in December 1991.

F

Independence

The newly independent Lithuania faced many political and economic challenges. In the turbulent period following the granting of independence, the Sjūdis coalition could not maintain its political leadership. Its popularity dropped as a result of political infighting, a severe economic crisis caused by the disruption of trade ties with the former Soviet republics, and a worsening of international relations with neighboring countries, including a dispute with Latvia over sea borders.

Meanwhile, former communist officials began to stage a political comeback in Lithuania. In early 1992 the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP), which had replaced the CLP, won a majority of seats in the Seimas. Later that year LDLP leader Algirdas Brazauskas was elected president with 60 percent of the vote. Popular support for the new LDLP government soon declined, however, in part because of a decline in standard of living resulting from the country’s transition to a market economy.

In 1993 Lithuania became the first of the Baltic states to be free of a Russian military presence. In 1994 the country joined the Partnership for Peace program, set up by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to allow for limited military cooperation between NATO and non-NATO countries.

In late 1995 Lithuania was rocked by a major banking scandal when two of its largest commercial banks, Innovation Bank and Litimpeks Bank, were shut down by the government after the discovery of widespread embezzlement. The parliament ousted the prime minister, Adolfas Slezevičius, in early 1996 when it was revealed that he had withdrawn his personal savings from Innovation Bank two days before it closed.

President Brazauskas decided not to seek reelection in January 1998. Valdas Adamkus, an ecologist who returned to the country after 50 years of living in exile in the United States, won the presidency by a narrow margin. Although nominally affiliated with the Lithuanian Center Union Party, Adamkus campaigned as an independent intent on leading Lithuania to economic success along Western lines. The government focused its efforts on economic reform and expansion, but a financial crisis in Russia in 1998 led to economic recession in Lithuania.

In 1999 President Adamkus publicly criticized the government for failing to eradicate corruption in the public sector and demanded the resignation of the prime minister. In May Rolandas Paksas, the mayor of Vilnius, was appointed as the new prime minister, but he resigned in October in protest of the privatization of a Lithuanian petroleum refinery to a United States company. His successor, Andrius Kubilius, succeeded in reducing the budgetary deficit, and the Lithuanian economy began to make a modest recovery in 2000. Paskas returned as prime minister after the 2000 elections, but his coalition government fell apart a year later. He was replaced as prime minister by former president Brazauskas.

G

Recent Events

In November 2002 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invited Lithuania to become a full member, along with the other Baltic States and four other nations. The three Baltic states were the first former Soviet republics to be invited to join NATO, which was originally formed to protect Western Europe from the USSR. In December 2002 Lithuania was one of ten countries formally invited to join the European Union (EU) as part of a long-planned expansion of that organization. Lithuania entered NATO in April 2004, and it was admitted as a full member of the EU one month later.

President Adamkus was widely credited with guiding Lithuania to full membership in the EU and NATO. He was also a proponent of economic policies that brought Lithuania economic growth accompanied by low unemployment. Scoring high public approval ratings, Adamkus was widely expected to win a second term in the presidential elections, and he received a clear lead in the first round of voting in December 2002. In the runoff election in January 2003, however, former prime minister Paksas won an upset victory after waging an aggressive populist campaign.

Paksas held office for slightly more than a year. In April 2004 he was impeached and dismissed from office by Lithuania’s parliament. Paksas was accused of unlawfully granting individuals Lithuanian citizenship in return for financial support, leaking classified information, and meddling in a privatization deal. The charges centered around his relationship with Yuri Borisov, a millionaire Russian businessman allegedly linked to organized crime, who helped finance Paksas’s election campaign in 2003. Lithuania’s Constitutional Court had found Paksas vulnerable to blackmail by Borisov and a danger to national security. Paksas denied any wrongdoing.

Under Lithuania’s constitution, Paksas was succeeded by the parliamentary speaker, Arturas Paulauskas. In the June 2004 election Adamkus returned to his post as president.

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