The Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty

On 10 October 1939, in the Kremlin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, and the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Juozas Urbšys, signed an agreement whose name said everything about its character: the “Treaty on the Transfer of the City of Vilnius and the Vilnius Region to the Republic of Lithuania and on Mutual Assistance between the Soviet Union and Lithuania”. The Soviet Union handed Lithuania Wilno (Vilnius) together with part of the Wilno region, occupied by the Red Army three weeks earlier during the invasion of Poland, while Lithuania agreed to Soviet military bases and, as a confidential protocol laid down, to the stationing of up to 20,000 Soviet troops in the country. The treaty was concluded for fifteen years. It was the third and last of the “bases pacts” that Moscow imposed on the Baltic states in the autumn of 1939, after the Estonian pact of 28 September and the Latvian pact of 5 October. The Lithuanians later summed it up briefly: “Vilnius is ours, but Lithuania is Russia’s.”

Lithuania between Berlin and Moscow

For twenty years the dispute over Wilno had shaped the whole of Lithuanian policy. In 1920, in its peace treaty with Soviet Russia, Lithuania had obtained recognition of its rights to the city and a large area around it, but in October that year General Lucjan Żeligowski’s division seized Wilno for Poland, and in 1922 it was incorporated into the Polish state. The Lithuanian constitution still named Vilnius as the capital, with Kaunas merely the “temporary capital”. Lithuania established diplomatic relations with Poland only in March 1938, forced to do so by a Polish ultimatum. A year later Germany took Klaipėda (Memel), its only port, and from then on the country was almost entirely dependent economically on the Reich.

In the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August Lithuania was assigned to the German sphere of interest, and both sides recognised its “interest in the Wilno area”. In September Berlin urged Kaunas to attack Poland and take Wilno by force. The government of President Antanas Smetona declared neutrality and did not take up the invitation. Polish soldiers who crossed into Lithuania after 17 September were interned. On 19 September, after a brief defence, the Red Army entered Wilno. On 28 September, in the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, Hitler ceded Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of interest in exchange for the Lublin region and part of Mazovia. It was also provided that if the Soviet Union took “special measures” in Lithuania, a strip of land on the left bank of the Šešupė, in the Lithuanian part of the Suwałki region, would go to Germany. On 29 September Berlin called off the talks it had announced with the Lithuanians, and Moscow invited the Lithuanian minister to negotiations on the “future relations” of the two states.

Stalin’s three demands

Urbšys flew to Moscow on 3 October. In a conversation in the Kremlin Joseph Stalin personally told him about the German–Soviet agreements and showed him maps with the line dividing the spheres of interest, and then set out three demands. Lithuania was to sign a mutual assistance pact allowing the Soviet Union to establish military bases on its territory and keep up to 50,000 troops in them. It was also to hand over to Germany the strip of land beyond the Šešupė, in accordance with the German–Soviet protocol, and in return accept part of the Wilno region together with the city itself.

This conversation is usually dated to 3 October and summarised as Stalin offering Lithuania Wilno in exchange for consent to bases, with the Lithuanians reluctant to agree. That is what happened. Urbšys protested against the garrisons, arguing that they would amount to a de facto occupation of the country and that Lithuanian neutrality was enough for the security of both states. He offered instead to strengthen the Lithuanian army. According to the account of Brigadier General Kazys Musteikis, who accompanied him, the minister even declared that Lithuania would accept neither Wilno nor the garrisons, to which an irritated Stalin replied: “Whether you take Vilnius or not, Soviet troops will enter Lithuania anyway.” The Soviets agreed to reduce the contingent to 35,000. Urbšys also bargained over the border in the Wilno region, asking in particular for the areas around Druskininkai and Švenčionys, where more Lithuanians lived. The Soviet negotiators replied that the 1920 line had been inaccurate and that the Belarusians also laid claim to these lands, and threatened that if Lithuania did not accept the pact, Wilno would be incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR. What surprised the Lithuanians most was the demand that they give up a piece of their own territory to Germany. They decided to put the matter off until Berlin itself raised it. The Germans confirmed that the secret protocol existed, but gave assurances that the matter was not urgent.

The second and third rounds

In Kaunas Urbšys reported to the government. Smetona doubted whether Wilno was worth such a price and wondered whether to break off the talks. Deputy Prime Minister Kazimieras Bizauskas argued that a refusal would not stop Moscow from sending in troops and would only cost Lithuania Wilno. He pointed to the example of Estonia, which the Soviet Union had forced into a pact under the threat of war, and to the Soviet troops massing in the Wilno region and in Latvia. The government agreed to the pact in principle, but instructed the delegation to resist the bases for as long as possible. As alternatives it proposed doubling the Lithuanian army, exchanging military missions or building fortifications on the border with Germany.

On 7 October Urbšys returned to Moscow with Bizauskas and the commander of the Lithuanian army, General Stasys Raštikis. Stalin rejected all the alternatives, but agreed to cut the number of troops to 20,000 – roughly the size of the entire Lithuanian army. The Soviets wanted to sign the treaty at once, on 9 October, the nineteenth anniversary of Żeligowski’s seizure of Wilno. At the same time rallies were being held in Wilno demanding the city’s incorporation into Soviet Belarus. Urbšys refused to sign and went back to Kaunas once more. The government decided at least to secure as much territory as possible. When the delegation returned to the Kremlin, the atmosphere was entirely different. The Soviets no longer wished to negotiate; they presented a new draft that combined the transfer of Wilno and the assistance pact in a single document, and demanded a signature. On 10 October Urbšys signed. After the ceremony Stalin invited the Lithuanians to dinner and a showing of two films. The government in Kaunas learned of the signing only on the morning of 11 October, by which time the TASS agency had already published the text of the treaty.

What the treaty laid down

The treaty had nine articles. Article I transferred the city of Vilnius and the Vilnius region to Lithuania, with the proviso that the border would be fixed by a separate protocol. It is sometimes claimed that Wilno was granted to Lithuania in a secret protocol. This was not so: the transfer of Wilno formed the published content of the agreement and stood at the head of its title, because Moscow wanted to present it as a gift. What was secret was the additional protocol limiting the Soviet contingent to 20,000 ground and air force troops. Article II provided for mutual assistance in the event of an attack or threat of attack on Lithuania, or on the Soviet Union “through the territory of Lithuania”, by any European power. In Article III the USSR promised to help the Lithuanian army with armaments, and Article IV gave it the right to keep ground and air forces in a “strictly limited” number at agreed locations, the sites of the bases to be determined by a separate agreement. Articles V and VI concerned joint action in the event of a threat and a ban on alliances directed against the other party, and Article VII stated that implementation of the treaty would not infringe the sovereignty of the parties, their system of government or the principle of non-interference in internal affairs. Articles II–VII were to remain in force for fifteen years, with automatic extension for ten more. The transfer of Wilno was without time limit.

Lithuania received less than the 1920 treaty had promised. The border agreement of 27 October gave it about one fifth of the area granted by that treaty: according to various calculations, between about 6,700 and 6,900 square kilometres with more than 400,000 inhabitants. The rest of the Wilno region, with Lida, Oszmiana, Mołodeczno, and also Druskininkai and Švenčionys, remained in the Byelorussian SSR.

Polish Wilno in Lithuanian hands

For the Poles it was yet another partition. Before the war Wilno had been a Polish-Jewish city. According to the 1931 census, Poles made up about two thirds of its inhabitants, Jews more than a quarter, and Lithuanians about 1 per cent. The government of General Władysław Sikorski in Paris protested against the treaty, refusing to recognise the Soviet conquest or Moscow’s right to dispose of Polish territory. Kaunas replied that Wilno had belonged to Lithuania by right since 1920. Britain and France also condemned the agreement.

Before the Red Army left the city, it removed everything it could: the equipment of factories, including the Elektrit radio works, of hospitals, railway rolling stock, motor vehicles, and museum and library collections. The NKVD also managed to arrest many Polish officers, officials and activists. On 28 October the Lithuanian army entered Wilno, for the first time since 1920. The Polish inhabitants received it coolly, many with hostility. Around the turn of October and November, when the price of bread suddenly rose, clashes with the police and between groups of inhabitants turned into riots directed against the Jews, in which many Jewish shops were looted and some 35 people injured. Soviet units still stationed in the area joined in suppressing them, uninvited by the Lithuanian authorities.

The Lithuanian authorities set about Lithuanising the city. On 15 December 1939 they closed the Polish Stefan Batory University, which had more than 3,000 students, introduced Lithuanian in public offices, and refused citizenship to many residents who had settled in the city after 1920, treating them as refugees. At the same time the Lithuanian army was handing out thousands of portions of soup and bread a day to the inhabitants of the starving city, and złoty were exchanged for litas at a favourable rate. Thousands of refugees from the lands occupied by Germany and the USSR found shelter in Wilno, including many Jews, as well as Polish soldiers who had escaped captivity. The city became one of the first centres of the Polish underground. Several thousand Polish soldiers were held in Lithuanian internment camps.

Place in the war

Negotiations on the location of the Soviet bases ended on 28 October, the day the Lithuanians entered Wilno. The garrisons – some 18,800 troops of the 16th Rifle Corps, with tanks and aircraft – were deployed at Naujoji Vilnia, Alytus, Prienai and Gaižiūnai, in such a way that they surrounded Kaunas. The first units marched in in mid-November, and the government, which included four generals, resigned. A new cabinet was formed by Antanas Merkys. Lithuania lost its freedom in foreign policy: when on 30 November the Soviet Union attacked Finland, which had refused a similar pact, Kaunas could not even express support for it. The Soviet Union kept the strip beyond the Šešupė, and in January 1941 bought it from Germany for 7.5 million dollars in gold.

The Lithuanians tried to fulfil the treaty to the letter so as not to give Moscow a pretext. A pretext was found all the same. On 25 May 1940 Molotov accused Lithuania of abducting Soviet soldiers from the bases, and on 14 June, as the Germans were entering Paris, he presented it with an ultimatum: a new government and the admission of an unlimited number of troops. On 15 June the Red Army occupied the country, Smetona fled to Germany, and on 3 August 1940 Lithuania was incorporated into the USSR as the Lithuanian SSR. Wilno, which the Lithuanian authorities had proclaimed the capital of the state although the government remained in Kaunas, became the capital of the Soviet republic. Arrests and deportations began, which also affected Poles from the Wilno region, and the NKVD sent the interned Polish soldiers to prisoner-of-war camps deep inside the USSR. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, at Ponary (Paneriai) near Wilno, the Germans and Lithuanian auxiliary formations murdered some 100,000 people, most of them Jews from Wilno. In 1945 Wilno remained within the Lithuanian SSR, and most of its Polish inhabitants had to leave for Poland. The border fixed in October 1939, extended in 1940 to include Druskininkai and Švenčionys, is today the border between Lithuania and Belarus.