The Soviet occupation of Lithuania

On 15 June 1940, the day the world was watching the Germans march through deserted Paris, Lithuania ceased to be an independent state. At seven in the morning the government in Kaunas decided to accept without reservation the ultimatum that a few hours earlier the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, had handed to the Lithuanian Foreign Minister in Moscow. In the afternoon columns of the Red Army crossed the border, and by the evening they had reached Kaunas and Wilno (Vilnius). President Antanas Smetona, the only member of the government to demand even token resistance, left the country and crossed into Germany by wading through a border stream. Seven weeks remained before Lithuania was incorporated into the USSR, but the country’s fate was decided in the space of that single day.

Many accounts speak of an “eight-hour ultimatum”, and present matters as if Smetona’s flight had prevented Moscow from taking over the country in a formally legal way, and as if the Soviet troops entering Lithuania had attacked Latvian border guards. Three clarifications are needed. Lithuania was given about ten hours: the ultimatum was handed over just before midnight on 14 June and the reply was due by 10 a.m. It was Latvia and Estonia that were given eight to nine hours, a day later. The president’s flight did indeed upset the Soviet plan to make every step look consistent with the Lithuanian constitution, although Moscow and its people in Kaunas soon found a way round it. The raid on the Latvian posts near Masļenki, on the other hand, was carried out by NKVD Border Troops from Soviet territory, not by the troops entering Lithuania, although it happened on the same night and was part of the same operation.

The pretext and the talks in Moscow

Lithuania had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of interest by the German–Soviet treaty of 28 September 1939, and on 10 October it had been forced to sign a mutual assistance pact: it received Wilno but admitted some 20,000 Soviet troops to bases around Kaunas. Through the winter the garrisons caused no trouble. In the spring, while the Wehrmacht was smashing the Western armies, Moscow decided that the time had come to finish the Baltic business. On 25 May Molotov accused Lithuania of abducting soldiers from the Soviet garrisons and torturing them to extract military secrets, and in the following days of murdering a junior commander, Butayev, who had in fact shot himself when the police came to detain him.

The Prime Minister, Antanas Merkys, went to Moscow on 7 June. In three meetings Molotov piled on new charges: he accused the Interior Minister, Kazys Skučas, and the head of the State Security Department, Augustinas Povilaitis, of organising provocations, and on 9 June he accused Lithuania of a secret military alliance with Latvia and Estonia – meaning the meetings within the Baltic Entente, which had never been a military alliance. Kaunas offered everything it could: withdrawal from the Entente, an investigation, the dismissal of Skučas and Povilaitis. Smetona wrote a personal letter to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin. The last meeting, on 11 June, produced nothing, and Merkys returned home. The government dismissed Skučas and Povilaitis and put the army on alert, but did not order mobilisation. Most politicians in Kaunas did not believe that the very existence of the state was at stake. The Christian Democratic and Peasant Populist opposition, excluded from power since 1926 by Smetona’s authoritarian regime, saw the Soviet pressure more as an opportunity to bring down the president than as a mortal threat.

The Red Army, meanwhile, was ready. From 5 June all Soviet forces in the Baltic region came under the People’s Commissar for Defence, Semyon Timoshenko; on 7 June the order was given to prepare a strike on Lithuania; and on 11 June the commander of the Belorussian Special Military District, General Dmitry Pavlov, approved the operational plan. According to Lithuanian studies, units of the 3rd and 11th Armies were massed on the border – some 220,000 men in all, with more than 1,500 tanks and more than a thousand aircraft. Almost 19,000 Soviet soldiers were already stationed in Lithuania itself. The Lithuanian Army numbered about 28,000 men. The troops were to cross the border quietly, use bayonets rather than firearms if necessary, and bypass Lithuanian units so as to occupy the country as quickly as possible. Field hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps were prepared. On 14 June, when Soviet aircraft over the Baltic shot down the Finnish airliner Kaleva, the fleet was already closing the sea routes out of the Baltic states.

The ultimatum

Just before midnight on 14 June – at about 11.50 p.m. according to Lithuanian documents – Molotov summoned Juozas Urbšys, who had stayed on in Moscow after the Prime Minister’s departure, and handed him the ultimatum. It repeated the charges of abducting soldiers and of conspiring with Latvia and Estonia, and then made three demands. Skučas and Povilaitis were to be put on trial immediately as guilty of provocations. A new government was to be formed in Lithuania, “capable and willing” to carry out the mutual assistance pact honestly. Soviet troops were to be admitted to Lithuanian territory “in sufficient numbers” to ensure the implementation of the pact and to prevent provocations – with no limit at all. The reply was due by 10 a.m. on 15 June. Molotov warned that the troops would march in whatever the reply.

Urbšys passed the text to Kaunas by telephone. This was an ultimatum of a different kind from those Lithuania had accepted before: the Polish one of March 1938 had demanded the establishment of diplomatic relations, the German one of March 1939 the surrender of Klaipėda (Memel). The Soviet one took everything from the state at once: its government, its army and its borders.

Night in Kaunas

The government met during the night in the presidential palace. Smetona argued that the demand to admit troops must be rejected and resistance offered, even if only symbolic: the army should be withdrawn westwards, to the German border, to show the world that Lithuania was not submitting voluntarily. He would agree only to a change of government. Merkys and the Deputy Prime Minister, Kazys Bizauskas, favoured accepting the ultimatum. They maintained that the Soviet soldiers had behaved correctly since October and that Moscow would go no further than it had announced. Bizauskas, a Christian Democrat, also saw in it a chance to remove Smetona’s regime. The army commander, General Vincas Vitkauskas, and his predecessor, General Stasys Raštikis, agreed that effective resistance was impossible, since Soviet troops were already in the country and the Lithuanian Army had not been mobilised. Urbšys, telephoning from Moscow, begged them not to provoke the Russians. The government rejected even the idea of a formal diplomatic protest, which in Raštikis’s view would only anger Moscow. Smetona is said to have declared that what was happening was an occupation, but he was left on his own.

At around 7 a.m. the meeting ended with a decision to accept all the demands without protest or reservation. Merkys resigned, and Raštikis, whom Urbšys knew to have been acceptable to the Russians earlier, was named Prime Minister. At around noon the answer came from Moscow: Raštikis was not a suitable person, and the composition of the new government would be settled on the spot by Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, a trusted associate of Lavrentiy Beria. Formally this was to be a matter of agreement; in reality, from that moment Moscow appointed Lithuania’s government. Dekanozov arrived in Kaunas – according to most accounts on the evening of 15 June – and took up residence in the Soviet legation. Merkys, meanwhile, continued to act as Prime Minister.

The president’s flight

Smetona had no intention of staying to put his name to what was to come. “I do not want to make Lithuania a Bolshevik country with my own hands,” he is said to have remarked before leaving the palace. In accordance with the constitution he handed over the duties of president to Prime Minister Merkys and at about 3 p.m. left Kaunas with his wife, his son and his daughter and their families, the Defence Minister General Kazys Musteikis and his aides-de-camp. He drove to Kybartai, a station on the border with East Prussia. There, together with Musteikis, he tried to summon the 9th Infantry Regiment from Marijampolė to protect the president and put up at least token resistance, but the regiment was stopped by a delegation sent from Kaunas to bring Smetona back. The Lithuanian border guards refused to let the president through. Late in the evening, around midnight, a local guide led him, with a bodyguard and an aide-de-camp, across the shallow Liepona stream to the German side. His family crossed the border the following morning.

On the German side a Gestapo officer was waiting for Smetona. Berlin gave him temporary asylum but made sure he did nothing that might irritate Moscow. For the Russians the flight was both a nuisance and a gift. A nuisance, because the president had signed neither the appointment of a new government nor the dissolution of the Seimas, Lithuania’s parliament, and his presence abroad undermined the appearance of continuity of authority. A gift, because propaganda could easily present the dictator’s “cowardly flight” as proof that the old regime had collapsed of its own accord, and no one had to make a martyr of him. Smetona escaped the fate of the presidents of Latvia and Estonia, Kārlis Ulmanis and Konstantin Päts, who stayed in their countries, signed for several weeks the decrees put in front of them by Soviet emissaries, and were then deported to the USSR, where they died.

The Red Army marches in

Soviet troops were to cross the border at 3 p.m. from three directions and take Wilno, Kaunas, Raseiniai, Panevėžys and Šiauliai. The Lithuanian Army was ordered not to resist and to greet the newcomers in a friendly manner, and the air force to stay on the ground. Columns of tanks and lorries blocked the roads. In the evening Soviet troops entered Kaunas and Wilno, and over the following days they occupied the whole country, including the border with Germany. The writer Ignas Šeinius later claimed to have seen the same squadron of Soviet aircraft fly over the city again and again, to create the impression of a power even greater than it really was. The show of force was meant to extinguish any thought of resistance, and it did its job. Lithuania did not fire a single shot.

The Russians had fired first. On the night of 14–15 June, while the ultimatum was being debated in Kaunas, provocations took place on the border with Soviet Belorussia, intended to justify an attack if one were needed. At around 3.40 a.m. a reconnaissance party of the 185th Rifle Division fired on a Lithuanian border police post at Ūta near Varėna, in the Alytus district. The soldiers dragged the post commander, Aleksandras Barauskas, out of the building, wounded him with a sabre and shot him in the head. He died on the way to a doctor, before the eyes of his wife and neighbours. Elsewhere the Russians interrogated Lithuanian guards and harassed local inhabitants.

That same night, at dawn on 15 June, units of the NKVD Border Troops attacked Latvian border guard posts in the Abrene district, on the Latvian–Soviet border. At about 2.30 a.m. some 25 soldiers crossed the river Ludza in the fog and surrounded the Masļenki post. When the guard Jānis Macītis spotted them and the first shots were fired, the attackers threw grenades at the building and set it on fire. Three border guards were killed – Jānis Macītis, Pēteris Cimoška and Kārlis Beizaks – as well as the wife of one of the guards, Hermīne Puriņa, and, according to most studies, her fourteen-year-old son Voldemārs. Half an hour later the attackers struck the Šmaiļi post; a third raid, on the Žuguri post, was called off when the NKVD realised it had been spotted. Thirty-seven people were abducted to the USSR – ten border guards and 27 civilians, including women and small children. The Russians returned 36 of them on 7 July, and in 1942 shot a local farmer, Dmitrijs Maslovs, as a “spy”. The Latvian government opened an investigation and put the army on alert, but with Soviet garrisons in the country it could do nothing more. The raid was a signal that Latvia’s turn had come: on 16 June it and Estonia received similar ultimatums.

Dekanozov and the “People’s Government”

Dekanozov set to work at once. On the morning of 16 June the Lithuanian government, exceeding its powers, declared Smetona’s departure to be a de facto resignation and granted Merkys full presidential authority. Merkys announced on the radio that Smetona had been removed from office. Bizauskas, regarded as an “opponent” of the dictator, briefly took over the duties of Prime Minister. All this was done to preserve the appearance of constitutional continuity – and that is precisely why independent Lithuania after 1990 held that, since Smetona had never resigned, neither Merkys nor his successor had any right to the office, and their acts were null and void.

On 17 June Merkys, obedient to Dekanozov, appointed the left-leaning journalist Justas Paleckis Prime Minister, approved his cabinet and resigned, whereupon Paleckis took over the duties of president. The writer Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius became Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and soon took over the duties of Prime Minister; General Vitkauskas became Defence Minister, and the former Prime Minister Ernestas Galvanauskas Finance Minister. The first line-up of the so-called People’s Government contained not a single communist. The choice was deliberate: the cabinet was to look like a left-wing government of Smetona’s opponents restoring the democracy that had existed before the coup of 1926, not like a tool of the occupier. Some Lithuanians, including Krėvė himself, believed it. The government’s programme, announced on 18 June and, according to historians, put into Paleckis’s hands by Dekanozov, spoke of friendship with the USSR, the dissolution of the Seimas and the release of political prisoners, but said not a word about Sovietisation. Moscow gave assurances that it respected Lithuania’s independence.

In those same days Molotov summoned the German Ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, to offer him the Soviet government’s “warmest congratulations” on the splendid successes of the Wehrmacht in France, and explained that it had been necessary to put an end to British and French intrigues in the Baltic states. Berlin took note. Germany, preoccupied with France, had no intention of defending states it had itself ceded to the Soviet sphere in August and September 1939, and treated Smetona as an awkward guest.

Place in the war

Sovietisation began in July. Before the elections several hundred of the best-known political figures were arrested (Lithuanian archival research speaks of more than five hundred, older literature of about two thousand). On 14–15 July elections were held to a “People’s Seimas”, in which there was one candidate for each seat, from a list dominated by communists; according to the official, falsified results, more than 95 per cent of those eligible voted and 99 per cent supported the list. On 21 July the Seimas proclaimed the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and asked for admission to the USSR. On 3 August 1940 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR admitted Lithuania as its fourteenth republic, followed in the next few days by Latvia and Estonia. Merkys and Urbšys were deported to the interior of the USSR; Skučas and Povilaitis, detained near the German border, were shot in Moscow in 1941. Within a year more than ten thousand people were imprisoned as “enemies of the people”, and on 14–18 June 1941 some 17,000 inhabitants of Lithuania were deported to Siberia and other remote regions of the USSR. This also fell upon Poles from Wilno and the Wilno region, and Polish soldiers interned in Lithuania were sent by the NKVD to camps deep in the USSR. Wilno, which Poland had lost in September 1939, was once again under Soviet rule. The United States, followed by most Western states, never recognised the annexation, and in Rome Stasys Lozoraitis took charge of the Lithuanian diplomatic service abroad.

The occupation of Lithuania was the first and decisive step in the seizure of all three Baltic states, and at the same time the clearest example of the method the Soviet Union had been using since the autumn of 1939: a “mutual assistance” pact with foreign garrisons, a fabricated incident, an ultimatum and the entry of troops, and finally the façade of a revolution supposedly carried out by “the people” themselves. Stalin used the moment when France was falling and Britain was fighting for survival to push the Soviet border up to East Prussia. It brought him no security: a year later, in June 1941, the Wehrmacht crossed Lithuania within a week, and many Lithuanians greeted it as a deliverer from Soviet repression, with tragic consequences for Lithuania’s Jews. For the Lithuanians the occupation meant half a century in the USSR. Lithuania declared its independence again on 11 March 1990, and the debate over whether the country could at least have offered token resistance, or whether its leaders should have left and formed a government-in-exile, continues there to this day.