Snyder T. The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. 384 p

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To Israel, our elder brother: respect, fraternity,

Help along the road to his earthly and eternal welfare.

Equal rights.

—Adam Mickiewicz, “A Set of Principles” (1848)

In September , when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland,

Wilno was in a profound sense a Jewish city: Vilne. Vilne Jews were character-

ized by many of the traits local Christian patriots wished their groups to mani-

fest. They were more distinguishable as a group than Belarusians, Lithuanians,

or even Poles. Although outnumbered by Poles in Vilne, Jews were reckoned a

third of the city’s population. They also counted generations of settlement in

the city itself, and centuries of recorded history in the region. Older Jews spoke

Russian rather than Polish, a legacy of the Russian empire. Yet in general the lit-

eracy and historical sense of Jews was the envy of national activists from all

sides. Most Jewish children were educated in Yiddish or Hebrew. Vilne re-

mained a center of Jewish cultural life on an international scale. Jews separated

by the Polish-Soviet border from Kiev and Odessa studied in Vilne, thereby

restoring to the city some of the status it had enjoyed under the Common-

wealth. YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, was founded in Vilne in .

Outstanding poets of Yiddish such as Abraham Sutzkever (– ) comprised

the Yung Vilne circle. As this suggests, educated Jews in interwar Vilne were en-

gaged in not one but three competing “national revivals”: the dispersion of Jew-

ish folk culture in Yiddish within Poland; the spread of literacy in Hebrew in

anticipation for the move to Palestine; and the attempt to master the state lan-

guage and assimilate into Polish life.

Jews of all ages, and especially Jewish youth, were far more politicized than

other inhabitants of the city. Lacking both gentry and peasantry, Jews avoided

the class conﬂicts and status complexes that hounded other political groups of

interwar Poland as they tried to apply unifying mass ideologies. On the other

hand, Jews disagreed about whether Poland or Palestine was the proper theater

of politics, and whether or to what extent religious believers could take part in

politics at all. Jewish political life within the city was, if possible, even more

fragmented than Polish. Although this energy and fragmentation reﬂected the

social isolation and precarious position of Jews within a Polish city, Jewish life

presented an imposing achievement. Just as the continuities of the Jewish cul-

ture exceeded even the most creative feats of national historians, so the plunge

into modernity of Jewish politics in the twentieth century outshone the best ef-

forts of any Christian nationality. That Vilne was the Jerusalem of Lithuania,

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

or indeed the Jerusalem of the North, required no special effort to ascertain. It

was one of the capitals of a second Europe, a Yiddish-speaking Ashkenaze Jew-

ish civilization, a particular unity following its own logic of development until

.

There was another Wilno, a Polish city. Along with Warsaw, Lwów, and Cra-

Second World War and Vilnius Question

Fig. . Plac Ratuszowy in Wilno (Vilnius).

cow, Wilno was one of four centers of Polish civilization. In Wilno in , Pol-

ish was the language of power and of culture, of most neighborhoods and most

homes, and increasingly of the countryside. Józef Pilsudski had revived Adam

Mickiewicz’s Wilno University in , exactly one century after the poet’s

graduation. As between  and , between  and  Wilno University

provided higher education in Polish to Poles, Russians, Belarusians, and Lithu-

anians. This time it also accepted and sometimes acculturated Jews. Migration

and Polish state power ensured that a majority of Wilno’s , or so resi-

dents self-identiﬁed as Polish. Some of those calling themselves Poles were Jews

who treated Polish identity as a matter of loyalty to the republic, affection for

Polish culture, or simple self-interest; a larger number had been born to fami-

lies that spoke Belarusian, and had learned Polish in school, in the army, or as

adults (if at all). The Jews excepted, there was no national rival to Poland within

the city. National tension in Wilno was mainly a matter of the Polish state, and

Polish institutions, constraining the freedoms of Jews after Pilsudski’s death in

. Polish rule was not necessarily popular among Jews and other minorities,

but it was the order of the day and seen as such until the Polish state was de-

stroyed in .

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

Fig. . A peasant woman at a market

in Wilno (Vilnius), interwar. Wilno

was the central concern of those who

laid claim to the heritage of Lithuania,

all of whom imagined that peasants

would ﬁnally choose a language and a

nation.

By comparison, the Lithuanian and Belarusian presence in interwar Vilnius

was negligible.

Jonas Basanavicˇius, the founder of Ausˇra, led a Scholarly Soci-

ety in Vilnius until his death in . The city’s Roman Catholic bishop be-

tween  and  was a Lithuanian, Jurgis Matulaitis. All the same, there

were simply too few Lithuanians in the city to sustain much in the way of visi-

ble culture. Vil’nia was the center of Belarusian life in Poland, but this was only

a relative distinction. Polish local authorities gnawed at the foundations of Be-

larusian society, refusing to deliver telegrams in Belarusian, conﬁscating Belaru-

sian newspapers, and closing Belarusian schools. Belarusian culture was permit-

ted, if not supported, for a time. Vil’nia was the center of Belarusian literature in

Poland, and for practical reasons Orthodox and Catholic churchmen alike be-

gan to use the Belarusian language. The Uniate Church, revived in Poland after

having been liquidated in the Russian empire, was now seen as a possible Be-

larusian national institution. The Jesuits, so important in the replacement of

Chancery Slavonic with Polish in the early seventeenth century, found it conve-

nient to use Belarusian in the s. As we have seen, a factor in the emergence

of early modern Polish nationality in the Catholic-Orthodox borderlands was

Second World War and Vilnius Question

Fig. . A Polish mansion in historic Lithuania (Lunna Wola, today Lunna, Belarus). In the

sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, social advance in historic

Lithuania involved Polish culture.

the adoption of Polish as the vernacular by the Jesuits and the Uniate Church.

The emergence of Belarusian as a vernacular useful to modern churchmen

hinted at the beginnings of the possibility of a modern Belarusian nation.

Vilnius lived a separate diplomatic life. Lithuania and Poland remained ofﬁ-

cially at war over Vilnius/Wilno between  and . Lithuanians in inter-

war Lithuania were isolated from their nominal capital. The Lithuanian gov-

ernment had cut phone and rail lines when it had left for Kaunas, and the

prevailing state of war precluded much human contact (although of course

some people had both passports).

The nationalizing project of the Lithuanian

state treated Vilnius as an object of immediate political concern, while mystify-

ing its history and demography. The army played an important role in the edu-

cation of young men, and male illiteracy fell from  percent to  percent on its

curricular diet of nationalist history. For two decades Lithuanian schoolchild-

ren learned that Vilnius was ethnically Lithuanian.

They read Mickiewicz’s

Pan Tadeusz in school in an abridged translation which expunged all references

to Poland and to Poles.

Ancient legends Mickiewicz had helped sustain, such

as Gediminas’s dream of the iron wolf, found modern political life in indepen-

dent Lithuania. The Iron Wolf was a conspiratorial fascist organization,

banned in . The Union for the Liberation of Vilnius, the Vilnius Founda-

tion, and the newspaper Our Vilnius were pillars of Lithuanian civil society.

October , the day Z

eligowski took Vilnius in , was a day of national

mourning. Throughout the interwar period, the Vilnius question played an

extraordinary role in Lithuanian domestic politics, as rivals attacked each other

for being too soft on the Poles or too yielding to the League of Nations.

In international fora, Lithuanian leaders announced that Poland was the

greatest danger to peace in Europe. Prime Minister Augustinas Voldemaras,

following his self-proclaimed principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my

friend,” counted on Soviet antagonism to Poland to bring Vilnius to Lithuania.

The legal foundation of the Lithuanian claim to Vilnius was a treaty signed

with Bolshevik Russia in . The  nonaggression pact with the Soviet

Union was attractive in part because the Soviets recognized the Lithuanian

claim to Vilnius. In  Voldemaras refused the request of British, French, and

Italian envoys that Lithuania establish diplomatic relations with Poland. Later

that year Voldemaras assured his Latvian counterpart that Poland was a greater

threat than Germany and the Soviet Union, and in  told British Foreign

Secretary Austin Chamberlain that while the Soviet threat was “purely theoret-

ical” the Polish threat was “entirely real.”

This Lithuanian position, inciden-

tally, was not based upon strategic miscalculation. Lithuanian leaders believed

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

that their culture, and therefore their nationhood, was under threat from

Poland. They felt no such threat from Russia. Despite appearances, this was a

reasonable view. Lithuanian culture had never won a contest with Polish cul-

ture; it would never lose one with Russian.

When Voldemaras later made peace overtures to Warsaw, he found that pub-

lic opinion and the Lithuanian army were keen to prevent concessions.

This

problem visited the authoritarian regime of Antanas Smetona throughout the

s, as it became clear that neither of Poland’s enemies—the Soviet Union and

Nazi Germany—were Lithuania’s friends. (Incidentally, Smetona had a Polish

wife and, like his generation of Lithuanian activists, spoke good Polish). Smet-

ona and much of the Lithuanian political elite eventually came to see that hostil-

ity toward Poland would not protect the Lithuanian state, and that Vilnius was

not the only important question of foreign relations. But the very success of

Lithuanian nationalism rendered the reversal of Lithuanian foreign policy ex-

ceedingly difﬁcult. The idea of reconquering Vilnius was the most inspiring part

of Lithuanian nationalism for the youth educated or conscripted after the First

World War. Smetona’s rule came to be seen by much of the next generation as

cowardly because it did not retake the city by force.

The demand for Vilnius be-

came so integral to the Lithuanian national idea that it threatened the very leader

who called himself “the father of the nation.” Relations were ﬁnally established

with Poland in , but only after a Polish ultimatum. Even this concession,

which concerned only the formal establishment of relations, brought down the

government and exposed Smetona himself to the opposition of much of society.

THE TRANSFER OF 1939

The destruction of the Polish state by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in

September  returned the Wilno question to international politics. In the

secret annex to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of  August , the Soviet

Union and Nazi Germany had agreed that “the interest of Lithuania in the

Vil’na area” was to be respected. Both sides hoped to use the city to manipulate

the Lithuanian government. The rapid advance of the German army through

Poland after  September  signaled that Vilnius was once again on the table.

The Lithuanian government declined a German offer of the city and a joint at-

tack on Poland. Britain and France would have opposed such a move, and the

attitude of the Soviet Union was as yet unknown.

Smetona and the govern-

ment also calculated that, in the short run, German rule would be worse than

Soviet; in the medium run, that the Soviet Union would be the victor in the

Second World War and Vilnius Question

German-Soviet war they expected; and in the long run, that if independence

was to be the price of Vilnius, it was better to make such a deal with the Soviet

Union.

This was realism of the most clear-eyed sort, from a position of basic

powerlessness. On  September , the Red Army occupied Vil’na, and the

Lithuanian representative in Moscow petitioned for the city. On  September,

Stalin and Ribbentrop revised the previous Nazi-Soviet arrangement, this time

leaving Lithuania and Vil’na within the Soviet sphere of inﬂuence.

Like Lithuanian diplomats, Belarusian activists hailing from both interwar

Poland and the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic also pressed their claim to

the city. The German-Soviet partition of Poland had granted to Stalin all of the

territories of interwar Poland inhabited by speakers of Belarusian. This was

welcomed, at least initially, by many of the Belarusian activists who claimed to

speak for a three-million-strong Belarusian community in Poland. Among

other things, they were convinced that Soviet expansion would bring Vil’nia

into an enlarged Belorussian SSR. This was not merely wishful thinking in-

spired by their understanding of Belarus as the successor of the Grand Duchy

of Lithuania, their experience of Polish opposition to Belarusian culture, and

their attachment to Vil’nia. Belarusian leaders from interwar Poland were en-

couraged in this belief by Belorussian communists from the Soviet side, who

themselves anticipated that the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic would in-

clude Vil’nia. After all, the Comintern had deﬁned “Western Belorussia” to in-

clude Vil’nia and the Vil’nia region. The  “LitBel” SSR, with its capital in

Vil’nia, was only twenty years in the past.

Preparations for the Soviet occupation of Vil’na in September  gave

every sign of plans to include the city within Soviet Belorussia. Ivan Klimov,

charged with the Soviet administration of western Belorussia, was authorized

in early September to declare Vil’nia the capital of a West Belorussian Soviet

Socialist Republic. The Belorussian NKVD, at a  September meeting, treated

Vil’nia as part of the formerly Polish territories it was to incorporate within the

Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the Wilno region, Belarusian, Jewish,

and Polish communist activists aided the Soviet occupation of  September in

the destruction of Polish state institutions. When Soviet troops reached Vil’na

on  September, plans for the city were put into effect. Soviet occupying au-

thorities used Belarusian in propaganda. The Soviet-sponsored newspaper jus-

tiﬁed the historic Belarusian claim to Vil’nia and explained the Belarusian char-

acter of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. On  September, Klimov proclaimed

to a meeting of leading Belarusians that Vil’nia would be joined to Soviet Be-

lorussia.

The message was warmly received by a community which had de-

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

voted much to the idea of a Belarusian Vil’nia. That both Vil’nia and Belarus

would be Soviet was perhaps forgotten in the enthusiasm of the moment.

Anton Lutskevich, the organizer of the ill-starred Belarusian republic of ,

and the leading Belarusian activist in interwar Poland, was among those con-

vinced. Lutskevich’s considerable personal achievements and his consistent po-

litical failures were all connected to Vil’nia. In Vil’nia he had begun his politi-

cal career as a democratic, patriotic socialist; in Vil’nia he had helped found and

edit the ﬁrst legal Belarusian newspaper before the First World War; in Vil’nia

he had led the National Council that declared Belarusian independence in ;

in Vil’nia he had published his protest of the Polish incorporation of Belarusian

territory after ; in Vil’nia he had taught at the Belarusian high school (until

he was ﬁred by Polish superiors); in Vil’nia he had led Belarusian educational

circles (until he was arrested by Polish authorities); in Viln’ia he directed the

Belarusian museum for nearly twenty years; in Vil’nia he completed the ﬁrst

modern Belarusian translation of the New Testament. This former proponent

of a renewed Grand Duchy, this translator of the Bible, was heartily disgusted

by two decades of Polish rule—and ready to believe that a Soviet Belorussia and

a Soviet Vil’nia were acceptable solutions to his people’s historic woes.

In late September  Stalin apparently decided to grant Vil’na to Lithua-

nia, and establish military bases on Lithuanian soil. Lutskevich and other Be-

larusian leaders in Vil’nia, led to believe that they would receive the city, instead

found themselves behind bars. Lutskevich died in Soviet detention. Belarusians

are early and forgotten victims of Stalin’s decision to grant Vil’nia to Lithuania.

Above and beyond the arrests and deaths of leading Belarusian activists, the de-

nial of Belarusian aspirations to Vil’nia seriously encumbered the Belarusian

cause. First, it meant that the Belarusian-speaking population surrounding the

city of Vil’nia was lost for the time being to the Belarusian national idea. Sec-

ond, the inclusion of Vil’nia within Lithuania (and soon within the Lithuanian

SSR) conﬁrmed the general belief that Lithuania and not Belarus was the suc-

cessor of Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The conﬂation of an old politonym with

a new ethnonym (“Lithuania”) prevented non-Belarusians from seeing the

connection between modern Belarus and the early modern Grand Duchy of

Lithuania. The Belarusian communists who entered Vil’nia with high hopes in

September  were also disappointed. Like Uniate priests of the nineteenth

century, Belarusian communists spent their time in the city of their dreams

gathering archival documents of the Grand Duchy. Forced to depart when

Stalin gave the city to Lithuania, Belarusian communists took the ﬁles they

stole from Vil’nia archives to Minsk.

Second World War and Vilnius Question

On  October  Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbsˇys learned that

the price for Vilnius was Soviet troops in Lithuania, and that the Nazi-Soviet

treaty of  September had placed Lithuania within the Soviet sphere of inﬂu-

ence. On  October the Lithuanian government demobilized its army. On 

October , nineteen years and one day after Z

eligowski’s troops had taken

Wilno for Poland, Urbsˇys signed an agreement with the Soviet Union granting

Vilnius to Lithuania. The price of Vilnius and other formerly Polish territories

(, square miles, , people) was basing rights for twenty thousand So-

viet soldiers in Lithuania.

The main response of Lithuanian leaders and

Lithuanians generally agreement was joy at the incorporation of Vilnius, ac-

companied by an outburst of pro-Soviet feeling. Fear of Soviet power was soft-

ened by the belief that, no matter how the war ended, Moscow would preserve

Vilnius for Lithuania. Lithuanians thought that the arrival of Soviet power

would cut the link between Vilnius and Poland, thus allowing for the region’s

Lithuanization.

As we shall see, these apparently odd predictions, based upon

fear of Polish but not Russian culture, proved rather accurate. Although this

seems strange to us today, many Lithuanian intellectuals even nurtured some

sympathy for the Soviet regime. Mykolas Römer’is, the nation’s outstanding ju-

rist, was an example. As he wrote in his diary, “I myself had considerable Soviet

sympathies before I encountered the Soviets, and in any event of the two I pre-

ferred the Soviet Revolution over Hitler’s national socialism.”

Thus a particular conjunction of Soviet and Lithuanian interests brought

Vilnius, for the time being, into independent Lithuania. Local Belarusians who

protested were deported from what was still independent Lithuania by the So-

viet NKVD; the Polish government in exile was told by Lithuanian authorities

that Vilnius had been legally Lithuanian throughout the interwar period.

Demographic realities were harder to deny. When Lithuanian troops marched

into Vilnius on  October , they were shocked to ﬁnd “instead of the

princess of their fairy tales, the streets of alien Wilno, unknown, speaking a for-

eign language.”

Such experiences only conﬁrmed intellectuals’ belief that

speakers of Polish were “Polonized Lithuanians” who must be Lithuanized.

This became the intellectual basis of Lithuanian policy. As Vilnius administra-

tor and prime minister Antanas Merkys put it, the aims were “to make every-

body think like Lithuanians” and “comb out the foreign element from the Vil-

nius region.”

Poles and Jews, even those born in the city, were often denied

Lithuanian citizenship. As Römer’is recorded in his diary, the application of

ethnic rather than geographic or political classiﬁcations precluded the forma-

tion of any sort of Lithuanian state loyalty in Vilnius. The local Lithuanian-

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

language newspaper “exposed” politicians who had accepted Polish rule in ,

thereby closing off the possibility that these elites could be seen as loyal Lithua-

nians in the new circumstances of .

The margin of hypocrisy necessary in

mature polities was quickly closed by representatives of an earnest young na-

tion, who in their enthusiasm lost sight of the world around them. As the Wehr-

macht occupied Paris, Poles and Lithuanians quarreled over Polish theatres in

Wilno/Vilnius. As Soviet troops poured into Lithuania in early , the na-

tional debate in Kaunas concerned the threat from defeated and dismembered

Poland.

In June , the Soviet Union extinguished Lithuanian independence. So-

viet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov issued an ultimatum calling for a

new government on  June; the Red Army entered Vilnius the next day. In

conditions of general terror, elections were held in July to “legitimize” a new

regime. The Communist-led Lithuanian People’s Bloc announced that it had

won  percent of the vote. Lithuania’s “application” to join the Soviet Union

was granted on  August. By  August  the Red Army had taken up new

positions, in greater numbers, in what had become the Lithuanian Soviet So-

cialist Republic. Between June  and June , the Soviet NKVD deported

twenty to thirty thousand Lithuanians, Poles, and Jews to Siberia and Kazakh-

stan.

Former Prime Minister Merkys and Foreign Minister Urbsˇys were de-

ported in July . President Smetona had ﬂed.

Smetona’s Lithuania, like interwar Poland, had been a nationalizing state.

Both Lithuania and Poland educated their populations in the spirit of nation-

alism, both sought to minimize the inﬂuence of national minorities in national

politics and culture. Both states resorted to physical repression of minority ac-

tivists deemed a danger to the state, and both (although Poland more than

Lithuania) were characterized by ofﬁcial anti-Semitism by the late s. Nev-

ertheless, the destruction of Poland and Lithuania in  and  by Nazi

Germany and the Soviet Union created the conditions for an entirely new sort

of national and racial policies on their territories. The Nazis and the Soviets did

what independent Poland and Lithuanian states did not: they deported and

murdered individuals on the scale of hundreds of thousands, and even millions,

on the basis of ascribed national or racial deﬁnitions. The practices of the Nazi

and Soviet regimes were of a completely different quality than those of Poland

and Lithuania.

This would be obvious just on the example of Polish-Lithuanian relations

under Nazi and Soviet rule. In – Soviet policy had aimed to decapitate

Second World War and Vilnius Question