Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 202
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Likhachev, Dmitry S. (2000). Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press.
JOHN PATRICK FARRELL
LISHENTSY See DISENFRANCHIZED PERSONS.
LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS
Located on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, Lithuania has been an independent republic since 1991. Encompassing 66,200 square kilometers, it has a population (2001) of 3,491,000 inhabitants, of whom 67.2 percent live in cities and 32.8 percent in rural areas. Over 80 percent of the population is Lithuanian, about 9 percent Russian, and 7 percent Polish.
Lithuanians first established a government in the thirteenth century to resist the Teutonic Knights attacking from the West. In 1251 the Lithuanian ruler Mindaugas accepted Latin Christianity, and in 1253 received the title of king, but his successors were known as Grand Dukes. When Tatars overran the Russian principalities to the East, the Grand Duchy expanded into the territory that today makes up Belarus and Ukraine. At its height, at the end of the fourteenth century, although the Lithuanians are a Baltic and not a Slavic people, Lithuania had a majority of East Slavs in its population, and for a time it challenged the Grand Duchy of Moscow as the “collector of the Russian lands.”
Faced by Moscow’s growing strength, Lithuanian leaders turned to Poland for help, and through a series of agreements made between 1385 and 1387, the two states formed a union, solidified by the marriage of the two rulers, Jagiello and Jadwiga, and by the reintroduction of Latin Christianity through the Polish structure of the Roman Catholic church. (Lithuania had reverted to paganism after Mindaugas’s abdication in 1261.) Reinforced by the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continued until the Partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1795 the Third Partition of Poland brought Russian rule to most of what today constitutes Lithuania.
Russian authorities attempted to wean the Lithuanians from the Polish influences that had dominated during the period of the Commonwealth. The Russians banned the use of the name “Lithuania” (Litva) and administered the territory as part of the “Northwest Region.” After the Polish uprisings of 1831 and 1863, the authorities helped Lithuanians in some ways but also tried to force them to adopt the Cyrillic alphabet. At the same time, the authorities limited the economic development of the region, which lay on the Russian-German border. Under these conditions, a Lithuanian national consciousness emerged, and with it the goal of cultural independence from the Poles and eventual political independence from Russia.
The Lithuanians received their opportunity in the course of World War I. On February 16, 1918, after almost three years of German occupation, the Lithuanian Council (Taryba) declared the country’s independence, but a provisional government began to function only after the German defeat in November 1918. Russian efforts in 1919 to reclaim the region in the form of a Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic failed, and in May 1920 a Constituent Assembly met and formalized the state structure.
The First Republic’s foreign policy focused on Lithuania’s claim to the city of Vilnius as its historic capitol. The Poles had seized the city in 1920, and as a result, Lithuania tended to align itself with
LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS
Birzai Panemunis Jurbarkas (Р Leipaja Gramzda. Skoudas
Kartena Palanga • Kretinga Baltic \ Klaipeda Sea Silute Nida /
10 •
/Kurshskiy Zaliv Ezere Telsiaig Silale #Taurage Jelgava
LATVIA
/Zagare aSiauliai anevezys Radviliskis /Ukmerge
5u
Kedainiai Jonava Kaunas Sintautai
"N
Utena _
7c=
^
0
0
^
LITHUANIA
20 40 Miles =i?^ 20 40 Kilometers Ignalina
4
*Pastavy
*Druskininkai . Hrodna
RUSSIA
Chernyakhovsk eVilkavis?kis Marijampole v^/^i Punia Alytus* ц
1
_^ POLAND Naujoji Vilnia. f% "^Vilnius Lentvaris *Juozapines I 985 ft. f 292 m. Lida
BELARUS
N
W "ip ? E S Lithuania, 1992 © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Germany and the Soviet Union as part of an anti-Versailles camp. In 1939, by the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union were to divide Eastern Europe, and Lithuania fell into the Soviet orbit. In 1940 Soviet forces overthrew the authoritarian regime that had ruled Lithuania since 1926, and Moscow directed the country’s incorporation into the Soviet Union as a constituent republic.
The 1940s brought destruction and havoc to Lithuania. In 1940 and 1941, Soviet authorities deported thousands of Lithuanian citizens of all nationalities into the interior of the USSR. When the Germans invaded in 1941, some local people joined with the Nazi forces in the massacre of the vast majority of the Jewish population of Lithuania. (In 1940 and 1941 Jews had constituted almost 10 percent of Lithuania’s population.) When the Soviet army returned in 1944 and 1945, Lithuanian resistance erupted and continued into the early 1950s. Thousands died in the fighting, and Soviet authorities deported at least 150,000 persons to Siberia. (The exact number of killings and deportations is subject to considerable dispute.)
Under Soviet rule the Lithuanian social structure changed significantly. Before World War II,
LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH
the majority of Lithuanians were peasants, and even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many urban dwellers still maintained some sort of psychological link with the land. The Soviet government, however, collectivized agriculture and pushed industrialization, moving large numbers of people into the cities and developing new industrial centers. By the 1960s, after the violent resistance had failed, more Lithuanians began to enter the Soviet system, becoming intellectuals, economic leaders, and party members. Emigr? Lithuanian scholars often estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of Lithuanian party members were “believers,” while the majority had joined out of necessity.
In 1988, after Mikhail Gorbachev had loosened Moscow’s controls throughout the Soviet Union, the Lithuanians became a focus of the process of ethno-regional decentralization of the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s program of reform encouraged local initiative that, in the Lithuanian case, quickly took on national coloration. The Lithuanian Movement for Perestroika, now remembered as Sajudis, mobilized the nation first around cultural and ecological issues, and later, in a political campaign, around the goal of reestablishment of independence.
Gorbachev quickly lost control of Lithuania, and he successively resorted to persuasion, economic pressure, and finally violence to restrain the Lithuanians. After the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence of the Soviet party in December 1989, worldwide media watched Gorbachev travel to Lithuania in January to persuade the Lithuanians to relent. He failed, and after Sajudis led the Lithuanian parliament on March 11, 1990, to declare the reconstitution of the Lithuanian state, Gorbachev imposed an economic blockade on the republic. This, too, failed, and in January 1991, world media again watched as Soviet troops attacked key buildings in Vilnius and the Lithuanians passively resisted Moscow’s efforts to reestablish its authority. The result was a stalemate. Finally, after surviving the so-called “August Putsch” in Moscow, Gorbachev, under Western pressure, recognized the reestablishment of independent Lithuania. See also: BRAZAUSKAS, ALGIRDAS; LANDSBERGIS, VYTAU-TAS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; POLAND; VILNIUS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eidintas, Alfonsas, and Zalys, Vytautas. (1997). Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918-1940. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Misiunas, Romuald, and Taagepera, Rein. (1992). The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990, expanded and updated ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1959). The Emergence of Modern Lithuania. New York: Columbia University Press. Senn,
Alfred Erich. (1990). Lithuania Awakening. Berkeley: University of California Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Vardys, V. Stanley. (1978). The Catholic Church, Dissent, and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania. Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly.
ALFRED ERICH SENN
LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH
(1876-1951), old Bolshevik, leading Soviet diplomat, and commissar for foreign affairs.
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was born Meer Genokh Moisevich Vallakh in Bialystok, a small city in what is now Poland. He joined the socialist movement in the 1890s and sided with Vladimir Lenin when the Social Democratic Party split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. From 1898 to 1908, he smuggled guns and propaganda into the empire, but having achieved little, he emigrated to Britain. There he married an English woman and led a quiet, conventional life, even becoming a British subject. During the October Revolution, he served briefly as the Soviet representative to London but was expelled from Britain for “revolutionary activities” in October 1918. In Moscow he became a deputy commissar for foreign affairs and frequently negotiated with the Western powers for normal diplomatic relations, to little success. However, Litvinov did conclude a 1929 nonaggression pact with the USSR’s western neighbors, including Poland and the Baltic states.
From 1930 to 1939 Litvinov served as commissar for foreign affairs. In 1931 he negotiated a nonaggression treaty with France, an extremely anti-Soviet state that had become worried about an increasingly unstable Germany. Soon after Adolf Hitler came to power, Litvinov initiated alliance talks with France, finding a partner in Louis Bar-thou, the foreign minister. In December 1933, the Soviet Communist Party leadership formally approved Litvinov’s proposal both for a military alliance with France and for the Soviet Union’s
LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT
entrance into the League of Nations. Talks took a tortuous course, but in June 1934, Barthou and Litvinov agreed on a eastern pact of mutual assistance that would be guaranteed by a separate Franco-Soviet treaty of mutual assistance.
For several reasons, however, these treaties proved ineffectual. First of all, Barthou was assassinated in October 1934, and Pierre Laval, an advocate of good relations with Germany, replaced him. Moreover, the British were hostile to close relations with Moscow, and France was generally unwilling to act without London’s support. Finally, in 1937, Stalin ordered the decimation of the Red Army’s leadership at the same time he was terrorizing the entire nation. To the already suspicious West, it seemed clear that the USSR could not possibly be a reliable ally. Litvinov realized the damage the Great Terror wrought on Soviet foreign policy but was powerless in domestic politics. Ignored and rebuffed at virtually every turn by the West, Litvinov was replaced by Stalin’s close associate, Vyacheslav Molotov, in May 1939, four months before the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
With the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Stalin appointed Litvinov ambassador to the United States. For the next two years, Litvinov constantly urged the West to open a second front in France. Angered at Litvinov’s lack of success, Stalin recalled him in 1943. He served as a deputy commissar for foreign affairs, making many proposals to Stalin advocating Great Power cooperation after the war. This effort failed, and Litvinov eventually understood that Stalin saw security not in terms of cooperation with the West, but in the building of a bulwark of satellite states on the USSR’s western border. Two months before his final dismissal in August 1946, Litvinov told the American journalist Richard C. Hottelet that it was pointless for the West to hope for good relations with Stalin. Perhaps the most remarkable and mysterious fact of Litvinov’s long career is that he died a natural death. See also: BOLSHEVISM; FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Phillips, Hugh. (1992). Between the Revolution and the West: A Political Biography of Maxim M. Litvinov. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sheinis, Zinovii. (1990). Maxim Litvinov. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
HUGH PHILLIPS
LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT
Also known as the Renovationist Movement, the Living Church Movement, a coalition of clergy and laity, sought to combine Orthodox Christianity with the social and political goals of the Soviet government between 1922 and 1946. The movement’s names reflected fears that Orthodoxy faced extinction after the Bolshevik Revolution. Renovationists hoped to renew their church through reforms in liturgy, practice, and the rules on clergy marriage.
The movement began in response to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Parish priests in Petro-grad formed the Group of Thirty-Two in 1905 and proposed a liberal program for church administration that would allow married parish priests, not just celibate monastic priests, to become bishops. This group joined advocates of Christian socialism in a Union for Church Regeneration that advocated the separation of church and state, greater democracy within the church, and the use of modern Russian instead of medieval Old Church Slavonic in the Divine Liturgy. Repressed after 1905, the reform movement reappeared in 1917 only to wither from lack of widespread Orthodox support.
The Living Church Movement appeared during the famine of 1921-1922, thanks in large part to Bolshevik suspicions that Orthodox bishops were plotting counterrevolution. The Politburo approved a plan for splitting the church through a public campaign to seize church treasures for famine relief. Bolshevik leaders secretly wanted to strip the church of valuables that might be used to finance political opposition. Patriarch Tikhon Bellavin and other bishops opposed the government’s plan to seize sacred icons, chalices, and patens. A small group of clergy led by Alexander Vvedensky, Vladimir Krasnitsky, and Antonin Granovsky used covert government aid to set up a rival national Orthodox organization that supported confiscation of church valuables, expressed loyalty to the Soviet regime, and promoted internal church reforms.
When Patriarch Tikhon unexpectedly abdicated in May 1922, Living Church leaders formed a Supreme Church Administration and pushed for revolution in the church by imitating the successful tactics of the Bolsheviks. Renovationists tried to force the church to accept radical reforms in liturgy, administration, leadership, and doctrine. Parish clergy responded favorably to proposed changes; bishops and laity overwhelmingly rejected them. Government authorities threatened, arrested,
LIVONIAN WAR
and exiled opponents to the Living Church, thereby further eroding popular support for reform.
Internal divisions within the Supreme Church Administration also weakened the movement. Three competing renovationist parties emerged. The Living Church Group of Archpriest Krasnitsky promoted church revolution led by parish priests. This group was more interested in giving greater power to parish priests by allowing them to remarry and to become bishops than in changing canons and dogma. Bishop Granovskii organized a League for Church Regeneration that espoused democracy in the church. The league appealed to conservative lay believers because it promised them a greater voice in church affairs and defended traditional Orthodox beliefs and practices. A third ren-ovationist party, the League of Communities of the Ancient Apostolic Church led by Archpriest Vve-densky, combined Granovsky’s democratic principles and Krasnitsky’s reform proposals with Vvedensky’s passion for Christian socialism.
Infighting among renovationist groups threatened to destroy the movement, so the Soviet government forced them to reconcile. The reunified Living Church gained control over nearly 70 percent of Russian Orthodox parish churches by the time their national church council convened in May 1923. The council defrocked Patriarch Tikhon and condemned his anti-Soviet activity. It also approved limited church reforms, including the abolition of the patriarchate and the ordination of married bishops, and proclaimed the church’s loyalty to the regime.
By June 1923 the Soviet government became worried over the strength of renovationism. The Politburo decided to release Tikhon from jail after he agreed in writing to acknowledge his crimes and to promise loyalty to the government. Orthodox believers and clergy immediately rallied to him. The re
formers reorganized in order to stop defections to the patriarchate. All renovationist parties were banned, most reforms were abandoned, and the Supreme Church Administration became the Holy Synod led by monastic bishops. Granovsky and Krasnitsky refused to accept these changes and were pushed aside. Vvedensky joined the Holy Synod in a reduced role.
The Renovationist Movement lost support throughout the 1920s, despite this reorganization and an attempt to reunite the church by calling a second renovationist national church council in October 1925. Most Orthodox believers saw everyone in the Living Church Movement as traitors who had sold out to the Communists. The movement declined dramatically throughout the 1930s as did the Orthodox church in general. The Living Church Movement experienced a short lived revival during the first years of World War II, when Soviet persecution of religion eased and Vvedensky became leader of the movement. In September 1943 Josef Stalin permitted senior patriarchal bishops to reinstate a national church administration. A month later, he approved a plan to merge renovationist parishes with the Moscow patriarchate. Vvedensky opposed this decision, but his death in July 1946 officially ended the Living Church Movement. For decades afterward, however, Orthodox believers used “Living Church” and “Renovationist” as synonyms for religious traitors. See also: FAMINE OF 1921-1922; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; TIKHON, PATRIARCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Curtiss, John S. (1952). The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950. Boston: Little, Brown. Freeze, Gregory L. (1995). “Counter-reformation in Russian Orthodoxy: Popular Response to Religious Innovation, 1922-1925.” Slavic Review 54:305-339. Roslof, Edward E. (2002). Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walters, Philip. (1991). “The Renovationist Coup: Personalities and Programmes.” In Church, Nation and State in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Geoffrey A. Hosking. London: MacMillan.