The Making of Modern Lithuania

Tomas Balkelis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415454704
• eBook ISBN: 9781134051137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that – contrary to contemporary Lithuanian nationalist rhetoric – Lithuanian nationalism was modern and socially constructed in the period from the emergence of the Lithuanian national movement in the late nineteenth century to the birth of an independent state in 1918. The book brings into sharp focus those aspects of the history of Lithuania that earlier commentators had not systematically explored: it shows how, in this period, the nascent political elite fashioned its own and the emerging nation's identity. Moreover, factors such as the elite's social isolation, educational experience, marital strategies and narrowly based, fragmented and uncoordinated political activities were crucial factors in shaping identity and nation-building. It demonstrates how the elite was often in conflict with the peasantry, the religious establishment and other ethnic groups, and how critical considerations such as class, religion, displacement and ethnicity – rather than national ideology – were. The book's conclusion that Lithuanian nationalism is a construct emerging from modern social forces is highly significant for understanding nationalism and contemporary political developments in Eastern Europe more generally.

1
Imperial periphery

Lithuanian provinces in late nineteenth century

Social and economic conditions

The Lithuanian movement originated in the political and social setting of late imperial Russia. Starting from the 1860s the empire underwent slow yet increasing modernization in different realms of its life. Most significant features of the post-reform years were growing social mobility of its multiethnic peasant populations, belated industrialization and urbanization and rising tensions in the centre-periphery relations as a result of the policy of forced integration introduced after 1863. These were the key developments that provided a historical background to the birth of multiple national movements among non-Russian populations of Russia, including the Lithuanians.

During the Soviet period, most Lithuanian, Russian and Polish writers, who wrote about the conditions under which the Lithuanian movement emerged, traditionally emphasized the impact of social and economic factors. They pointed out that, as a result of the land reform of 1861, in Vilna, Kovno and Suwalki provinces, a substantial number of the Lithuanian peasants became increasingly wealthy by acquiring more land.¹ The confiscations of land property from participants of the 1863 January uprising as well the 1865 government ban on the purchases of land in the Lithuanian provinces by ‘persons of Polish origins’ further increased the amount of available land, some of which went to the peasant owners. In the wake of the reform, peasant land possession increased by 46 per cent in Kovno province and by 29 and 12 per cent in Vilna and Suwalki provinces.² As a result of this land transfer, the socially homogeneous Lithuanian peasantry became increasingly stratified. Hence, the second part of the century witnessed gradually improving material conditions in the life of the peasantry, among which there emerged a group of well-to-do farmers able to afford education for their children. This process was particularly visible in Suwalki province which had the largest group of independent peasantry.³ Gradual technological advances, such as the development of railways and small-scale manufacturing, as well as increasingly modern forms of agricultural production and emigration, further stimulated social mobility among the peasantry some of whom could already afford to educate their children.

The motives that prompted peasants to educate their children were mostly practical and economic: unwillingness to divide land among sons, agricultural overpopulation and growing demand for various professionals in the wake of measured modernization in the Russian empire.⁴ One of the early Lithuanian activists, Stasys Matulaitis, pointed out that at the time ‘a large number of Catholic priests in Lithuania were children of well-to-do peasants, because the profession of priest was one of the most affordable careers for peasant children; it required neither a long period of study nor great expense’.⁵ However, by the 1870s–1880s increasing numbers of peasant children also started pursuing secular education. Later they formed the core of the new Lithuanian ethnic elite, the intelligentsia (on their origins see Chapter 2).

Yet these social and economic changes should not obscure the fact that the Lithuanian provinces remained essentially an economic backwater of the Russian empire, a sort of ‘double periphery’, as described by some writers.⁶ The government saw the region largely as a north-western defensive bulwark against Germany which meant that a large share of the new economic investment went into a military sector. As a result, Lithuanian provinces largely missed out the large-scale industrialization that took place in cities such as Riga, Warsaw, Bialystok, Lodz, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but barely in Vilna or Kovno. The largest industrial centres in the region were Bialystok with its textile factories and Riga with its shipbuilding docks, while only small-scale industries (distilling, wood and agricultural product processing) were found in the Lithuanian cities.⁷ The belated abolition of serfdom in 1861 (in the Baltic provinces it ended as early as 1818–1919) and slow urbanization were among the key factors that hindered the local social and economic development.

After the abolition of serfdom, peasants gained their personal freedom in Lithuanian provinces as well. However, the reform did not alleviate the social tensions between the predominantly Polish and Russian landlords and the Lithuanian peasantry.⁸ The latter did not gain legal title to the land; instead of corvee they now had to pay rent for the land they worked. Despite the growing availability of land for independent farmers, the social relationship between landowners and the majority of peasants remained the same after the reform, which meant that the peasant still economically relied on his landlord. The local landlords, along with the inefficient and heavily under-staffed Russian police, still meted out justice to peasants. No wonder that the rebellion of 1863 in Lithuania had a strong social undertone.

According to the 1897 population census, Lithuanian society consisted of almost a monumental group of peasants (93 per cent among the ethnic Lithuanians).⁹ The largest cities of Vilna and Kovno had populations of only 150,000 and 70,000 respectively, while Riga, an economic hub of the Baltic region, had more than 280,000. Less than two per cent of Lithuanians lived in towns which were heavily dominated by Poles, Jews and Russians. A noticeable feature of late imperial Lithuanian society was almost a complete absence of an ethnic Lithuanian middle class. Local town and country economies were dominated either by Jews or Polish-speaking nobility. Of all population of Kovno and Vilna provinces, 14 and 13 per cent respectively were Jews, while in Grodno their percentage was almost 18 per cent.¹⁰ In 1897, Jews formed 40 per cent of Vilna’s population, while there were 30 per cent of Poles, 25 per cent of Russians and Belarusians and only two per cent of Lithuanians.¹¹ This contrasted sharply with places like Riga and Reval which by the end of the century had Latvian and Estonian majorities. The Lithuanian economy continued to be dominated by a heavily agricultural and self-subsistent peasant economy with a poorly developed communication network. In Lithuania the first railways were constructed between 1860 and 1873, while in the Baltic provinces and Central Russia they appeared in the 1850s.

The emergence of modern ways of transportation in the region of economic stagnation facilitated migration of local population to more developed countries. The lack of economic opportunities and the social tensions in the countryside were responsible for massive emigration starting from the late 1860s. According to some estimates, out of 1.64 million Lithuanians who resided in Russian empire (1897 census data) almost twenty five per cent (410,000) emigrated to foreign countries and Russian cities between the 1860s and 1914.¹² The two largest groups of emigrants were the landless Lithuanian peasants and the Jews. As a result of the mass emigration, on the eve of World War I, almost 75,000 Lithuanians found themselves living in other Russian provinces, largely in urban centres such as Riga (28,000), Saint Petersburg (26,000) and Libau (Liepaja, 11,000).¹³

In the post-Soviet years, the majority of Lithuanian and exile historians who wrote about the early national movement tended to embrace the impact of political and cultural rather than economic and social factors.¹⁴ Their preoccupation with the process of national identity formation among Lithuanians directed them to linguistic, cultural and religious conflicts. The failure of the 1863 uprising and subsequent nationality policies of Russia in the region became seen as key factors that shaped the early national movement. As a reaction to the uprising, the Tsarist authorities started pursuing a policy of forced integration in the north-western provinces that in turn stimulated national movements among local populations. The most visible manifestation of this policy was the pursuit of cultural and linguistic Russification among Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians in the region starting from the early 1860s. Most significantly, Russification greatly encouraged the resurgence of Polish nationalism, the strongest oppositional force in the region, which readily assumed the role of a defender both of Polish nationhood and the political tradition of the former Polish-Lithuanian state. In the long run, Polish nationalism clashed with the movements among Lithuanians, Belarusians, Jews and Ukrainians which claimed their own individual share of the same historical heritage. These conflicts in turn helped to define national identities of local patriotic elites and their respective ethnic groups. The proponents of this argument usually claim that the tradition of political radicalism was extinguished neither after 1831 nor 1863, and resurfaced in new forms in 1905 and 1918. The fact that throughout the nineteenth century, the Lithuanian nobility (with only a few exceptions) gravitated towards the Polish elite opened new directions for political action for the emerging Lithuanian national elite of peasant origins.

Russification

A debate continues among scholars over the meaning, character, scale and purposes of Russification in late imperial Russia. Many East European, and a large group of Western historians tend to emphasize its systemic and openly aggressive character towards ethnic groups such as Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. They see the policy as playing a constitutive role in the formation of local national movements. For them, Russification is largely an expression of the newly born Great-Russian nationalism expressed in government’s desperate efforts to bring administrative, social and cultural uniformity to the Russian empire.¹⁵ Often this policy is teleologically attributed to Catherine the Great, or as far back as Peter the Great.¹⁶ There is little consent among these authors on the issue whether this policy was intended as a means of modernizing the empire or as negative reaction towards modernization. Many agree, however, that Russification was envisioned as total assimilation with an intention of transforming Russia into an ethnically homogenous nation-state on the scale of Bismarck’s Germany or Napoleonic France. According to this line of thought, in the long run, ethnic groups such as Belarusians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians were destined to be transformed into Russians. This interpretation is often corroborated by the writings of Russian officials such as the Governor General of Vilna, P.D.Sviatopolk-Mirskii, who argued that because of their small numbers and lack of historical traditions the Lithuanians, for instance, would ultimately ‘be absorbed into the general population of Russia’.¹⁷

In the last decades, this traditional account of Russification underwent serious revision by a group of Western historians including Thaden, Rogger, Pearson, and most recently, by Weeks and Kappeler. Without denying the negative impact to various ethnic groups, they point out that Russification hardly represented a uniform, coherent and consistent policy.¹⁸ This was largely due to the confusing and contradictory motives that shaped it. The most sophisticated interpretation is offered by Andreas Kappeler, who questions whether there ever was a single Russian policy of nationalities. He proposes to use the term ‘Russification’ only with regard to its linguistic and cultural aspects.¹⁹ Kappeler sees the policies of assimilation as an ongoing dialogue in the Tsarist government between the proponents of the imperial and nationalist (reformist) strategies of integration of non-Russian groups into the empire. The major weaknesses of the traditional account of Russification are revealed, first, by the fact that it was unevenly applied to different ethnic groups. If Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians were targeted right after 1863, the Baltic provinces and Armenia only from 1881. In the case of Finland, Russification was almost non-existent before 1903 when the Governor General N.Bobrikov was given dictatorial powers.²⁰ In some instances, the government continued to cooperate with local elites even after Russification had started, as in the case of the Baltic Germans. Moreover, some of the ethnic groups such as the Jews and Tatars were isolated and segregated, rather than integrated. The proponents of this line of thought argue that total Russification, in the sense of full assimilation, was never intended towards an ancient historical nation such as the Poles. Therefore, Russification can be better understood, according to Kappeler, as an extension of a policy of forced integration or bureaucratic standardization comparable to similar policies in the late Habsburg and German empires.²¹ The key rationale of this policy was not the linguistic assimilation but strengthening of state structures within the non-Russian peripheries.

Despite the fact that Russification was primarily intended as a means of administrative standardization, in the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian state it assumed an especially oppressive character. There, besides standardization, the major goal of the Russian government was to curtail the political and cultural influence of its major political foe within the post-1795 imperial borders. Among the nationality issues, the Polish question always remained at the centre of...

Table of contents

• BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Imperial periphery
• 2 Provincials in the empire
• 3 The making of the urban elite
• 4 In search of the people
• 5 In search of national brides
• 6 The making of national culture
• 7 War, displacement and nation-building
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index