Tomas Balkelis

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 most effective means of creating political and national consciousness in a hitherto apolitical peasant society; the answer would seem to be yes.… (más)