Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (55 page)

The Lithuanian national movement started from similarly humble beginnings. Church-based Lithuanian primary schools had long functioned, but a sixty-year struggle with the Russian authorities had to be fought before permission was given for Lithuanian to be written in the Latin alphabet. By the early twentieth century, however, the first generation of Lithuanian-educated Lithuanians was coming to the fore. They were passionate about language and literature, about separating their own ethnic history from that of their neighbours and about gaining recognition.

In 1800 the Jewish community of the former grand duchy had been defined exclusively by religion. By 1900, after exposure to an unprecedented demographic explosion, to pogroms and to a series of modernizing movements, it had emerged as a recognized nationality. The
Haskalah
or ‘Jewish Enlightenment’, which urged Jews to assimilate into public life while preserving their religious practices in private, operated throughout the century. Yet the spread of the Hasidic movement, demanding new forms of strict religious observance, worked in the opposite direction. One of its prominent sects, the
Lubavicher
, gained many devotees in the southern districts.
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Zionism, in contrast, grew out of Jewish secular culture and the Hebrew Revival, that is, the campaign to adapt the Hebrew language to everyday purposes. The Second Zionist Congress, held at Minsk in 1902, revealed the existence of a fully fledged Jewish nationalist movement. Its main goals were to sharpen Jewish identity against other nationalities, to encourage emigration to Palestine and, like nationalists the world over, to complain of discrimination and persecution (quite justifiably, in this case, after the passing of the discriminatory May Laws of 1882). It inevitably collided with the
Bund
, which sought to reconcile Jews with their neighbours and to build a better world for all.

By 1914, therefore, the political scene was fragmented in the extreme. Visions of the future were irreconcilably diverse:

[T]he old capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a desired political capital to Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles… a spiritual capital to the Jews… and an ancient Russian city to the officials who exercised power. Most of the city’s schools taught in Russian, most of its churches were Roman Catholic, more than a third of its inhabitants were Jews… The city was… ‘Vilnius’ in Lithuanian, ‘Wilno’ in Polish, ‘Vil’nia’ in Belarusian, ‘Vil’na’ in Russian and ‘Vilne’ in Yiddish…

Vilnius was for Lithuanian activists the capital of the Grand Duchy, built by Grand Duke Gediminas at the dawn of Lithuania’s glory. Increasingly, they saw the medieval Grand Duchy as the antecedent of an independent Lithuanian state…

Belarusian national activists, too, harkened back to the Grand Duchy, regarded themselves as its heirs, and claimed Vil’nia as their capital. Unlike [the Lithuanians]… they favored a revived Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth… The Belarusian idea began to compete seriously with the imperial idea [of  ] ‘West Russia.’ In Vil’nia city, Belarusian speakers far outnumbered Lithuanian speakers. In the Vil’nia province… [they] were more than half the population. The first important Belarusian periodical,
Nasha Niva
(Our Soil), appeared in 1906.

Under Russian imperial rule, a special sort of Polish culture consolidated its hold on… the Wilno region (
Wileńszczyzna
). Despite a series of [discriminatory] laws… Poles still owned most of the land, [and] were probably the city’s plurality… Assimilation to Polish language was regarded not so much as joining a distinct national [group] as joining respectable society… Aware of their families’ roots… and often bilingual or trilingual themselves, [such Poles] regarded the Grand Duchy as the most beautiful part of the Polish inheritance… In the early twentieth century, their political views were given a federalist structure by patriotic socialists such as Józef Piłsudski…

The Jews, who represented 40 percent of the city’s population and perhaps three quarters of its traders… had inhabited the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ in large numbers for four hundred years. The ‘Lithuania’ in question was the old Grand Duchy, which had included cities such as Minsk (by this time about 51 percent Jewish), Homel (55 percent), Pinsk (74 percent), and Vitebsk (51 percent). The Vitebsk of this era is best known from the paintings of its native son, Marc Chagall (1887–1985).
¹⁰³

Thanks to international convulsions beyond their control, all the national movements that had taken root in the former grand duchy were about to be overwhelmed by outside interests. During the First World War (1914–18), the area saw fierce fighting between German and Russian armies on the Eastern Front; and after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and Civil War it was subjected to a series of political experiments. In March 1918 at Brest (which the Poles call Brześć Litewski and the Germans Brest-Litowsk), Leon Trotsky signed away a large swathe of the dead Tsarist Empire, including most of the former grand duchy, where the experiments mushroomed. The stunted Republic of Lithuania, founded with German support in 1917 in Kaunas (Kovno), could not realize its claims on Vilnius; and the resultant Polish-Lithuanian feud ever the city obstructed all attempts at post-war co-operation.
¹⁰⁴
The Byelorussian National Republic, created by local activists in Minsk, lasted for little more than a fortnight.
¹⁰⁵
The Communist-run Lithuanian-Byelorussian Republic which succeeded it, the ‘Lit-Byel’, created in conjunction with the Bolsheviks, endured barely a year.
¹⁰⁶
In 1919–20 the Polish army of Józef Piłsudski established a brief interval of dominance in the region. After its victory in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20, Poland held onto ‘Middle Lithuania’ and partitioned Byelorussia with the Soviets.
¹⁰⁷
The official name of Vilna reverted back to Wilno.

In the inter-war period, the Lithuanian Republic lost its democracy to the regime of Antanas Smetona (1874–1944), while partitioned Byelorussia lost all prospect of self-government. Western Byelorussia, under Polish rule, remained a backward region, but its difficulties bore no comparison to the horrors taking place beyond the Soviet frontier. Under Lenin’s auspices, the Byelorussian SSR – in eastern Belarus – was granted use of the Byelorussian language and a nominally autonomous administration in Minsk. In reality, it was run from Moscow through the iron dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party. The Uniate Church, which had resurfaced during the German occupation of the war years, was eradicated even more viciously than in tsarist times. Under Stalin, the young Byelorussian intelligentsia, educated in the 1920s, was almost annihilated; the leaders of the Byelorussian national movement were shot. Any independent peasants were destroyed during the collectivization campaign. The Jewish community was deeply split between the secular, pro-Soviet element organized by the all-powerful
Yevsektsiya
or Jewish section of the Communist Party and the traditional, religious and non-Communist majority. Many decades later, the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk would reveal the secret mass graves of hundreds of thousands of unidentified victims of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’.
¹⁰⁸

In the Second World War the former grand duchy lay in the eye of the storm from beginning to end, being subjected to an ordeal unparalleled in the whole of European history. Both Western Byelorussia and Lithuania were awarded by the Nazi–Soviet Pact to the Soviet sphere of influence. A joint Nazi–Soviet victory parade was staged in Brest in September 1939, and Lithuania was overrun by Stalin’s Red Army in June 1940. The first Soviet occupation was marked by mass executions, deportations and repressions. German occupation followed when ‘Operation Barbarossa’ crashed over the frontier in June 1941; it spurned all the many opportunities that arose to present the Nazi regime as a liberator. A quick glance at the wartime map reveals that (with the exception of Leningrad/St Petersburg) the weight of devastation and Nazi oppression were not inflicted on Russia but on the non-Russian republics. (The German military
Reichskommissariat Ostland
coincided in large measure with the post-1569 grand duchy.) The year 1941 also signalled the onset of the Nazis’ two largest crimes: the genocidal Holocaust against Jews and the liquidation of Soviet prisoners by starvation. The scene of these crimes largely coincided with the horrors of unbelievably ferocious anti-partisan warfare. In 1944 the victorious and vengeful Red Army smashed its way west regardless of the human cost. The retreating Germans created ‘scorched-earth’ zones and last-ditch ‘fortresses’ to be defended to the death. In one single campaign, Operation Bagration, which drove the front to the River Vistula, Marshal Rokossowski reoccupied the whole of Byelorussia and destroyed more than fifty German divisions. In the process, Minsk and several other cities were completely razed, with enormous loss of civilian life. Then the world’s record-breaking murder machine, Stalin’s NKVD, appeared to filter, arrest, shoot, torture, deport and terrorize the survivors.

A land so afflicted could never be the same again. The Lithuanians had been severely depleted by Soviet actions in 1940–41 and 1944–5. The Poles were decimated, partly by the early Soviet deportations, partly by the German occupation, and partly by the post-war ‘repatriation campaign’. The Jews, murdered by the Nazi SS during the Holocaust, had been virtually exterminated. The Byelorussians suffered from all sides. By 1945 human losses in Byelorussia were estimated at 25 per cent of the population. No other part of Europe – not Poland, not the Baltic States, not Ukraine and not Russia – had sustained such mind-numbing levels of slaughter.
¹⁰⁹

For forty-six years after the war, Lithuania and Byelorussia sweated out a further spell within the Soviet Union, where the question of their reintegration was not even considered. Not only were they behind the Iron Curtain in the post-war period; they were corralled behind the extra grille that separated them from other countries of the Soviet bloc. The watchword was reconstruction. But they were poorly treated compared to more favoured republics. Politically and economically, they were held in the stranglehold of Communist Party control and of centralized command planning. Socially, they had been artificially homogenized, and they could exploit a tiny margin of autonomy only culturally and linguistically. In the Lithuanian SSR, the Lithuanian language was retained as the principal medium of education and administration, and a Lithuanian Communist elite took pains to keep the influx of Russians at bay. By the late twentieth century over 80 per cent of the citizenry remained Lithuanian by speech and nationality. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, Lithuania became a viable candidate for separation. Early in 1991 it was the first of the Soviet republics to demand independence.
¹¹⁰

The Byelorussian SSR was less coherent in its ethnic composition and far more confused in its objectives. It had never recovered fully from its wartime devastation. The inflow of ethnic Russians was not stemmed, especially into top positions, and Russophile sentiment came in with them. The great mass of people were indigent, collectivized state serfs, whose knowledge of their own history and culture was minimal. Religion was sorely curtailed. The native Uniates were not reinstated and the Roman Catholic churches stayed shut, as they had since 1917. The Byelorussian language, written exclusively in Cyrillic, was rarely a vehicle for subversive thoughts. And the border with Poland remained closely guarded.

Nonetheless, when the moment of Soviet collapse arrived, the Byelorussian Communist Party did not falter. It acted as host to a secret meeting held in the tsar’s former hunting lodge at Viskuli in the Belovezh Forest on 9 December 1991, when the representatives of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine declared the USSR to be extinct. The world’s largest state expired painlessly. It met a much easier death than that suffered by the grand duchy almost two centuries earlier.

Archives are, in a sense, the dust and ashes of a dead polity. They contain the records of monarchs who reigned, of institutions that functioned and of lives that were lived. Like boxes of family papers in the attic, they are an indispensable aid to accurate memory and to trustworthy history.

The condition of archives, therefore, gives a good indication of the strength of memory and the reliability of the history books. If archives are well ordered, one may conclude that the legacy of past times is respected. If not, it is likely that memory and history have been neglected. One of the first decisions of ill-willed regimes is to order the destruction or sequestration of their predecessors’ archives. In the case of the grand duchy, large parts of the archives have totally disappeared.

The
Metryka Litevska
or ‘Lithuanian Register’ is the commonest collective name for the original indexes/archival inventories of the grand duchy’s central chancery. Since it no longer exists in one place, it is difficult to estimate its size. But, at a minimum, it was made up of a thousand huge, leather-bound ledgers, and it contained six main divisions: Books of Inscriptions (i.e. summaries of laws and decrees), Books of ‘Public Affairs’ (records of the Chancellor’s Office),
Sigillata
(copies of documents issued under the grand-ducal seal), Court Books, Land Survey Books, and Legation Books relating to foreign affairs. The time-span stretches from the very early thirteenth century to the very late eighteenth century. The principal languages employed are
ruski
(Old Belarusian), Latin and Polish.