War, Revolution, and Nation-Making in Lithuania, 1914-1923

The Greater War

by Tomas Balkelis

In this book, Tomas Balkelis explores how the Lithuanian state was created and shaped by the Great War from its onset in 1914 to the last waves of violence in 1923. As the very notion of independent Lithuania was constructed during the war, violence is seen as an essential part of the formation of Lithuanian state, nation, and identity. War was much more than simply the historical context in which the tectonic shift from empire to nation-state took place. It transformed people, policies, institutions, and modes of thought in ways that would continue to shape the nation for decades after the conflict subsided.

In telling the story of the post-WWI conflict in Lithuania, War, Revolution, and Nation-Making in Lithuania, 1914-1923 focuses on the soldiers and civilians involved in the conflict, rather than the strategies and acts of politicians, generals, or diplomats. The volume's two main themes are the impact of military, social, and cultural mobilizations on the local population, and different types of violence that were so characteristic of the region throughout the period. The actors in this story are people displaced by war and mobilized for war: refugees, veterans, volunteers, peasant conscripts, POWs, paramilitary fighters, and others who took to guns, not diplomacy, to assert their power. This is the story of how their lives were changed by war and how they shaped the society that emerged after war.

Genres: History, War

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2018

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomas Balkelis writes this monograph in the spirit of the current paradigm that, in the wake of the collapse of the great European empires in 1918, that their lands became a "shatter zone" where intense violence was probably inevitable. What was not inevitable is that the so-called "Baltic States" would emerge as independent players, as the preferred paradigm of the European great powers was, at most, a few favored larger assemblages, such as represented by Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. Or Russia remaining a unified state under a successor government to the Romanov dynasty.

Therefore, the emergence of Lithuania is a very contingent outcome. That this state did so is a commentary on both how the regimes of Lenin's Soviet Russia and Pilsudski's new Polish state managed to cancel each other out, when they reached the limits of their military power, at the same time that the Lithuanians managed to create effective military power out of a grab-bag of paramilitary bands, with some German and British assistance. Essentially, Lithuania was one state where the peasant farmer did become the basis of a new regime, and the emerging national leadership worked hard to build on this social basis. The issue is that the politics that emerged were very fascistic. One is thus left with the question of whether fascism, as a continuation of the Great War's politics of mobilization, with all its hard edges, was the most effective means of creating political and national consciousness in a hitherto apolitical peasant society; the answer would seem to be yes.

[Julius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book if you're interested in the WWI history in Lithuania, and how war helped mobilize a newly forming society.