Lithuania's history: an empire and a nation that never shared a language

How the Balts stayed outside Christian Europe

Hunters arrived in the second half of the tenth millennium BC, after the glaciers withdrew. What shaped everything afterwards was where the Balts settled: the lower and middle basin of the Neman, a corner of the continent that traders found remote and unrewarding. Tacitus described the Aesti of the south-eastern Baltic shore around AD 97, but no empire ever pressed a frontier against these forests the way Rome pressed one against the Danube.

Isolation preserved things that had been replaced elsewhere. The Lithuanian language is unusually conservative and close to its Indo-European roots, and is thought to have separated from Latvian around the seventh century. Pagan practice lasted with it. Grand dukes were still being cremated in the fourteenth century, and the descriptions of the funeral rites of Algirdas and Kęstutis survive.

The name arrives late, and it arrives badly. Litua appears for the first time in the annals of Quedlinburg Abbey under the date 9 March 1009, in an entry recording the killing of the missionary Bruno of Querfurt, who had baptised a ruler the annals call King Nethimer. The first written record of the country is the report of a failed conversion.

The raiding ran outward rather than inward after about 1180. Polotsk and Pskov were sacked in 1183 and Novgorod was threatened repeatedly. Forty expeditions went out against Ruthenia, Poland, Latvia and Estonia between 1201 and 1236. Raiding for plunder and slaves paid well enough to divide society into ranks, and the struggle over the proceeds is where the state came from.

Why Mindaugas took a crown and gave it back

By the early thirteenth century two German crusading orders had established themselves on the Baltic, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword at the mouth of the Daugava and the Teutonic Knights in Chełmno Land. Their method was conquest under the description of conversion, and it worked. The Old Prussians, Yotvingians, Sambians, Skalvians and Galindians did not survive it as distinct peoples.

Lithuania survived by consolidating. In 1236 the pope declared a crusade against the Lithuanians, and in the same year the Samogitians destroyed the Livonian Brothers at Saule, forcing the survivors to merge into the Teutonic Knights. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle names Mindaugas, one of five senior dukes listed in a treaty of 1219, as the ruler of all Lithuania from that year.

He then did the expected thing and undid it. In 1250 he agreed with the Teutonic Order to accept baptism in exchange for a royal crown, Pope Innocent IV signed the necessary bulls on 17 July 1251, and Mindaugas was crowned in 1253. It is the only coronation in Lithuanian history. In 1260 the Samogitians beat the Order at Durbe and offered to submit to Mindaugas on the condition that he abandon the Christian religion. He agreed, stopped the conversion of the country where it stood, and went back to war.

What he left was a policy rather than a kingdom: hold the German orders off in the west and the north, take Ruthenia in the south and the east. His successors followed it for a century and a half, which is how a pagan duchy on the Neman came to govern Orthodox Slavs as far as the Dnieper.

How Vilnius came to rule Ruthenia

The conquest ran ahead of the conversion, and the conquered supplied what the conquerors lacked. The Ruthenian lands taken by the Gediminid dukes brought their own institutions with them: the Church Slavonic liturgy of Orthodoxy, a system of law, and a written language, Chancery Slavonic, developed to handle the document work of the Lithuanian court and used for it for the next few centuries. Vilnius became a major centre of Kievan Rus' civilisation while the men who ruled it were still pagan.

Conversion, when it came, was a transaction. In 1385 the pagan grand duke Jogaila accepted the Polish crown from Polish nobles at Krewo on condition that he be baptised and marry the thirteen-year-old crowned king Jadwiga. He was baptised as Władysław, crowned in Poland in February 1386, and spent the following year conducting mass baptisms at home; a bishopric was founded at Vilnius in 1387. The purpose was strategic as much as spiritual: baptism removed the Teutonic Knights' legal pretext for attacking Lithuania, and in 1403 the pope duly forbade them to.

Under Vytautas, Jogaila's cousin and rival, who ruled Lithuania in practice from 1392, the state reached its greatest extent. Polish and Lithuanian armies together ended the Teutonic threat at Grunwald on 15 July 1410. Pskov and Veliky Novgorod became dependencies and were incorporated in 1426 and 1428. By the fifteenth century the Grand Duchy was the largest state in Europe, running from the Baltic towards the Black Sea. Vytautas was negotiating a royal crown of his own with the Holy Roman Emperor at Lutsk in 1429 when he died.

Two facts about that empire govern everything after it. Samogitia, Christianised from 1413, was the last region of Europe to be converted. And ethnic Lithuania proper accounted for about a tenth of the Grand Duchy's area and a fifth of its population. The dynasty was Lithuanian, the realm was mostly Slavic and Orthodox, and the paperwork was in neither Lithuanian nor Latin. Belarusian historiography reads the same state as the first Belarusian one, and it has the stronger claim on the written record: Francysk Skaryna, the printer usually called the founding father of Belarusian letters, wrote in the Chancery Slavonic of the Grand Duchy.

What the union with Poland cost the language

The Union of Krewo was renewed and redefined four times between 1401 and 1499, and each renewal drew the Lithuanian nobility further into Polish forms. The Union of Lublin of 1569 made a single Commonwealth of the two states, with a common Sejm and an elected monarch, while the Grand Duchy kept its own laws, army and treasury. Ukraine and the other southern territories were detached from Lithuania in the process and attached directly to the Polish Crown.

The language went first, and it went from the top down. Lithuanian had fallen out of use at the grand ducal court by the second half of the fifteenth century in favour of Polish, and a century later ordinary nobles were using Polish as well. The Third Statute of Lithuania was still written in Ruthenian Chancery Slavonic in 1588, but from about 1700 Polish replaced Ruthenian and Latin in official documents. The nobility became Polish in speech and culture while holding on to a firm sense of Lithuanian identity, a distinction that reads oddly now and did not read oddly then.

Lithuanian survived underneath, as a peasant vernacular and in religious print. The first printed Lithuanian book, the catechism of Martynas Mažvydas, appeared in 1547, and it appeared in Königsberg, in Lutheran East Prussia, outside the Grand Duchy altogether. Samogitian nobles never stopped speaking it. Lithuania Minor, the north-eastern corner of East Prussia, mattered for the same reason: Lutheran publishers printed in local languages.

The Commonwealth broke on war and demography. The Deluge of 1655 to 1661 wrecked the economy and Vilnius was burned and looted, the Great Northern War of 1700 to 1721 arrived before recovery, and plague and the famine of the Great Frost of 1709 cost roughly 40% of the population. Reform came too late. The Constitution of 3 May 1791 was the first comprehensive written constitution in Europe, and four years later the third partition ended the state that made it. Russia took over 90% of the Grand Duchy's territory.

How book smugglers made a nation out of peasants

Poles and Lithuanians rose against Russian rule in 1830 and again in 1863, and both risings made the position worse. Nicholas I closed Vilnius University after the first and began an intensive programme of Russification. After the second, the governor general Mikhail Muravyov banned Lithuanian primers in Latin letters in 1864, and the prohibition widened into a ban on printing Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet at all, with Cyrillic mandated in its place. The policy rested on the claim that Lithuania had always been Russian and was merely being restored to itself.

The answer was smuggling. Books were printed in East Prussia, most of them at Tilsit, and carried over the border at night by men called knygnešiai, book carriers. The newspaper Aušra, edited by Jonas Basanavičius, was printed at Ragnit in Prussia from 1883 and brought in the same way. Some 2,500 titles were published in the Lithuanian Latin alphabet during the ban, and between 1864 and 1904 the authorities arrested 3,047 people over it: 829 smugglers, 859 distributors and 1,359 found in possession of banned books. The ban was lifted in 1904, and UNESCO has since recognised the smuggling as a form of resistance with no parallel elsewhere.

What came out of it was a language rather than a province. A standard written Lithuanian was settled by 1900 on historical and Aukštaitijan usage; the letters č, š and v were taken from redesigned Czech orthography specifically to avoid the Polish spellings of the same sounds, and Jonas Jablonskis published the accepted grammar in 1901. A poem written by Vincas Kudirka in 1898 became the national anthem. Both Kudirka and Basanavičius came from prosperous peasant families and passed through the same secondary school at Marijampolė.

The movement then made a territorial choice that still sets the country's borders. Restoring the Grand Duchy was explicitly abandoned as an objective; the activists limited their claims to the lands they judged historically Lithuanian, which meant defining a nation as the sum of the speakers of a vernacular rather than as the heir of an empire. When Anton Luckievich proposed a Belarusian-Lithuanian federation at Vilnius in 1918, along the old ducal lines, the Lithuanian leadership was not interested. Emigration ran alongside the revival: roughly 635,000 people, almost a fifth of the population, left between 1868 and 1914.

Why the interwar republic sat in Kaunas

A Vilnius conference held under German occupation in September 1917 elected a twenty-member Council of Lithuania, and the Council adopted the Act of Independence on 16 February 1918. The state it proclaimed was to be based on ethnic identity and language, and independent of Russia, Poland and Germany at once.

It lost its capital within a year. The Germans handed Vilnius to Polish self-defence units on 1 January 1919, the government evacuated to Kaunas, and the Red Army took the city four days later. Three years of shifting possession followed, ending in a manoeuvre. The Suwałki Agreement of 7 October 1920 left Vilnius on the Lithuanian side of the armistice line; the next day General Lucjan Żeligowski invaded on Józef Piłsudski's orders in an action staged as a mutiny, took the city on 9 October, and set up a Republic of Central Lithuania that was annexed to Poland on 24 March 1922.

Kaunas served as temporary capital for nineteen years. Lithuania refused to accept the loss, broke off relations with Poland and remained formally at war over the city until 1938, a dispute that dominated foreign policy for the whole interwar period.

The republic gained a coast the same way it had lost a capital. Lithuanian forces seized the Klaipėda region from its League of Nations administration in January 1923, and it became an autonomous district in 1924, the country's only access to the sea. Germany took it back by ultimatum on 20 March 1939 and Lithuania accepted rather than fight.

Democracy lasted eight years. A military coup in December 1926 installed Antanas Smetona, who dissolved the Seimas in 1927, issued a constitution of his own in 1928, and ruled as an authoritarian president until June 1940. The country remained agricultural, with a fifth of the population in the towns, and grew by 22% to over three million between 1923 and 1939. The towns changed character fastest: Lithuanians made up 59% of the residents of Kaunas in 1923 against 7% in 1897.

What the occupations took from Lithuania

The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 assigned Lithuania to Germany, and a revision that autumn moved it into the Soviet sphere. On 10 October 1939 the Soviet Union handed Vilnius back to Lithuania in exchange for basing 20,000 Red Army troops in the country, a trade summarised at the time in the phrase that Vilnius was theirs and Lithuania was Russia's. The ultimatum came on 14 June 1940, Smetona fled, 150,000 Soviet troops crossed the border, and a People's Seimas elected in a show ballot voted on 21 July to join the Soviet Union, which was formalised on 3 August.

Sovietisation was immediate: land and banks nationalised, the litas withdrawn, every organisation but the Communist Party banned, and some 12,600 people deported to Siberia in June 1941, mostly officers, officials and intellectuals with their families. Lithuania is estimated to have lost 780,000 people between 1940 and 1954 under the two occupations.

How the Holocaust unfolded in Lithuania

Germany invaded on 22 June 1941 and held the whole country within a week. Estimates of the Jewish population before the war range from 160,000 to 210,000, swollen by refugees from German-occupied Poland to around 250,000 by 1941, and about 90% of Lithuanian Jews were murdered. The killing began in the first days of the occupation rather than by stages, carried out by Einsatzgruppe A and by Lithuanian auxiliaries at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, at Ponary outside Vilnius, and across the countryside by the Rollkommando Hamann. An estimated 80% were dead before 1942. Roughly 43,000 survivors were held in the Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai and Švenčionys ghettos, and only about 2,000 to 3,000 Lithuanian Jews were liberated from the camps those ghettos became.

Local participation is the part still argued about. Franz Walter Stahlecker reported to Heinrich Himmler in October 1941 that he had concealed the role of his own vanguard unit in the Kaunas pogrom to present it as a spontaneous local initiative, evidence both of German direction and of a local response worth staging. Lithuanians joined police battalions expecting them to become a national army and found some of them used as auxiliaries in the killing. Vilnius had been called the Jerusalem of the North, the city of the Vilna Gaon and one of the great centres of Jewish learning in Europe, and the community that made it so was destroyed on its own streets.

Why the forest war went on so long

The Red Army returned in July 1944 and the Western allies conceded the annexation at Yalta and Potsdam. Armed resistance continued for nine years. Around 20,000 partisans fought in the forests, and between 40,000 and 60,000 combatants and civilians died after 1945, which is to say more ethnic Lithuanians died after the war than during it. Adolfas Ramanauskas, the last commander of the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters, was arrested in 1956 and executed in 1957.

Deportation ran in parallel. Nearly 120,000 people, about 5% of the population, were deported between 1944 and 1953, among them most Catholic priests and much of the intelligentsia. What followed was quieter than in the other Baltic republics. Non-Lithuanian immigration never reached the scale seen in Latvia or Estonia, Vilnius was resettled and assimilated by Lithuanians rather than Russians, and Vilnius University reopened teaching in Lithuanian. Schools in the Soviet republic taught more in Lithuanian than at any earlier point in the country's history. The price the intelligentsia paid for those concessions was Communist Party membership, and Lithuanian historians have been arguing about that bargain since 1990.

How Lithuania walked out of the Soviet Union

The reform movement Sąjūdis formed in mid-1988 and the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR began voting its own laws supreme, restoring the flag and the anthem. On 23 August 1989, fifty years to the day after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians held a human chain 600 kilometres long from Vilnius to Tallinn.

On 11 March 1990 the Supreme Soviet proclaimed the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania. Lithuania was the first Soviet republic to declare independence, and it declared a restoration rather than a founding, on the argument that the 1940 annexation had never been lawful. Moscow demanded revocation on 15 March and imposed an economic blockade from 18 April to the end of June. On 13 January 1991 Soviet forces seized the Vilnius television tower, killing 14 unarmed civilians and injuring 140. Moscow did not push further. A referendum on 9 February 1991 returned more than 90% for independence on a turnout of 84.73%, and after the failed August coup in Moscow recognition came on 6 September and United Nations membership on 17 September.

The years after followed the region's pattern: the independence movement lost the 1992 election to the renamed Communist Party, which continued the transition anyway, and the right returned in 1996. Privatisation ran through investment vouchers rather than cash and produced no oligarchy of the Russian kind. Russian troops completed their withdrawal on 31 August 1993, the litas was reissued that June, and Lithuania joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, the eurozone on 1 January 2015, last of the three Baltic states, and the OECD in 2018. The 2009 recession cut GDP by 15%, and emigration after accession has taken as much as a fifth of the population abroad.

Dalia Grybauskaitė served as president from 2009 to 2019, the first woman in the post and the first to be re-elected. A NATO summit met in Vilnius in July 2023, in the city the interwar republic could not hold, under a government whose working language is the one the Grand Duchy never used.