Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius

Lithuania state institutions 1882–1954 → Died in exile in the United States

Lithuanian writer who led the “People’s Government” of 1940 and resigned after Molotov told him the Baltic states would join the USSR

Born to a peasant family in the village of Subartonys in the Dzūkija region, he took his pen name from Krėvė, the name villagers gave his family. He received a doctorate in philology at Lviv in 1908, taught in Baku and in 1919 became Lithuania’s consul in Azerbaijan. From 1922 he taught Slavic literature at the University of Lithuania, and he is counted a classic of Lithuanian literature. After the Soviet occupation of June 1940 he joined the “People’s Government” as foreign minister and acting prime minister, but on the night of 1 July Molotov told him in Moscow that all the Baltic states had to join the Soviet Union; he returned and resigned. In 1941 he became the first president of the Lithuanian SSR Academy of Sciences. In July 1944 he left for Austria before the Soviets returned, and from 1947 he taught at the University of Pennsylvania until his death in 1954.