Nation-building and world war I refugees in Lithuania, 1918 – 1924

Abstract

This paper explores how population displacement operated in Lithuania in the immediate post-WWI period. In 1918 the disintegration of the old imperial polity led to the emergence of a Lithuanian state. Beyond the field of battle, the struggle to maintain the independence of Lithuania was characterised by an intense process of state and nation-building. All this hectic activity was accompanied by population displacement on a scale first witnessed in 1915–16. Unlike the military campaigns, these state-building efforts did not come to an end in 1920. My argument is that population displacement presented the Lithuanian authorities with an opportunity to claim and to establish Lithuanian refugees as potential members of a new nation-state, thereby defining its spatial, demographic and cultural boundaries. The newly formed Lithuania offered a potential political homeland for tens of thousands of war refugees of various ethnic groups who had lived in the former north-western provinces before 1914, but who were displaced by war. According to rough estimates, the total number of Lithuanian refugees who settled in the Russian interior stood at 550,000 at the beginning of 1918. My paper explores their fate in the post-war period as well as official policies of the new Lithuanian state adopted towards the refugees. The logic of the homogenising national state required that the refugees had to be persuaded or forced to abandon their divergent and multiple identities born in exile and rooted down in the single space of the national homeland. Nevertheless, the spatial pattern of ‘the homeland’ was still in flux, due to the border wars between Lithuania, Soviet Russia and Poland in 1918–20. As a result, some refugees were excluded from the ranks of Lithuanian citizenry. Their difficult situation was further aggravated by famine in Russia in 1921, which called for cooperation between Soviet Russia, Lithuania, Poland and Latvia. Thus, on the one hand, the refugees served as a focus for the propaganda of the belligerent states, while on the other hand their uncontrollable movement compelled governments to co-operate. The paper is based on two collections of primary documents: the files of the Lithuanian Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs.