Lithuania's first president who led the declaration of independence, later leader of the 1926 coup
Before leaving the presidential palace he declared, "I do not want to make Lithuania a bolshevik country with my own hands."
Chairman of the Lithuanian Council, he signed the 1918 declaration of independence and as first president from 1919 led the governments that fought the Red Army, Bermondt's troops and the Poles. He built an authoritarian regime after the 1926 coup and, fleeing the Soviet occupation of 1940, died in a fire in the United States in 1944.
Career timeline
1902Graduated in law from St. Petersburg University; journalist and national activist in Vilnius
1917Chairman of the Council of Lithuania
1918Signed the Act of Independence (16 February)
1919First President of Lithuania
1925Chairman of the Lithuanian Nationalist Union
1926Led the December coup; returned as president and ruled with authoritarian powers
Founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party who headed Soviet Lithuania and Litbel
When Lenin demanded he recruit more Lithuanians into the Red Army, he refused, warning it would erode what support his government had.
Founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party, he headed the Soviet government of Lithuania from December 1918 and Litbel in 1919, without winning peasant support. After the defeat he handled Baltic affairs in the Comintern and died in Moscow in 1935.
Career timeline
1903Joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party
1914Met Lenin in Kraków
1917Joined the Bolsheviks in Petrograd; commissar for Lithuanian affairs
1918Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party; editor of Tiesa
1918–1919Headed Soviet Lithuanian government, then Litbel's Council of People's Commissars
1923–1935Worked on the Comintern Executive Committee
Interior commissar of Soviet Lithuania, a Lithuanian communist leader killed in the Great Terror
He urged that Lithuania remain an independent state, yet imagined that independence as socialist.
A Lithuanian communist leader, he was commissar for internal affairs of Soviet Lithuania and Litbel in 1918 and 1919. In exile he worked in the Comintern and wrote the history of the Lithuanian labour movement; arrested in 1938, he was shot in 1940.
Career timeline
1906Joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (Central Committee member from 1907)
1909Arrested and sentenced to four years' katorga, later exiled to the Yenisei province
1917Deputy commissar for Lithuanian affairs in Petrograd, editor of Tiesa
1918–1919Commissar for internal affairs of the first Soviet Lithuanian government
1920Secretary of the Lithuanian CP's Foreign Bureau (Comintern executive representative from 1921)
1926–1935Chairman of the Comintern International Control Commission
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.
Career timeline
1908Doctorate in philology, University of Lviv
1919Lithuanian consul in Azerbaijan
1922Professor of Slavic literatures, University of Lithuania
1940Foreign minister and acting prime minister of the People’s Government
Lithuania's first prime minister, later leader of the far-right Iron Wolf
Dissolving the Seimas in 1928, he quipped that he had promised to hold elections but had made no promise about the year.
Prime minister and foreign minister of Lithuania's first cabinet in November 1918, he later fought the Vilnius question in Paris and at the League of Nations. Prime minister again after the 1926 coup, he led the far-right Iron Wolf, broke with Smetona and died in a Soviet prison in 1942.
Career timeline
1910Master's degree in history and philology, St. Petersburg University
1916Professor at Perm University; joined the Party of National Progress
1918First prime minister and foreign minister (Nov); head delegate to the Paris Peace Conference
1918–1920Foreign minister in successive cabinets
1926Member of the Third Seimas; prime minister and foreign minister after the December coup
1928Border treaty with Germany; de facto leader of the far-right Iron Wolf
1929Ousted by President Smetona and exiled
1934–1938Imprisoned after the failed coup; exiled to France in 1938
Last prime minister of independent Lithuania, who accepted the Soviet ultimatum of 1940, took the presidency and handed power to Paleckis
Born to a smallholding peasant family near Skapiškis, he studied law and was minister of defence (1919, 1926–1927), governor of the Klaipėda Region and mayor of Kaunas. After serving in autumn 1939 as government commissioner for the Vilnius region, he became prime minister that November, and in June 1940 he argued for accepting the Soviet ultimatum. When Smetona left the country he became acting president, announced on the radio the next day that he was now president in his own right, and on 17 June appointed Justas Paleckis prime minister and resigned. Lithuania regards this takeover of the presidency as unconstitutional. A month later he tried to escape to Sweden but was arrested in Riga and deported to Saratov; he was imprisoned in 1941. Released in 1954 but not allowed to return to Lithuania, he died in Vladimir in 1955.
Lithuanian officer and envoy in Berlin who founded the Lithuanian Activist Front behind the June Uprising of 1941
Mobilised into the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War, he was the first to enlist in the Lithuanian armed forces after independence in 1918, and on 1 January 1919 his men raised the Lithuanian flag over Gediminas’ Tower in Vilnius. He became Chief of the General Staff in 1925 but had to resign after opposing the 1926 coup. He was envoy to Germany in 1927–1930 and 1938–1941. After the Soviet occupation of 1940 he founded in Berlin the Lithuanian Activist Front, which sought to restore independence by working with the Nazis; named prime minister of the provisional government in 1941, he was held under house arrest by the Germans. In 1944 he was arrested for a memorandum demanding a Lithuanian government. After the war he settled in the United States, working at the Library of Congress. His antisemitic writings have made dedications in his honour controversial.
Career timeline
1919Raised the flag over Gediminas’ Tower
1925–1926Chief of the Lithuanian General Staff
1938–1941Envoy to Germany
1940–1941Founded the Activist Front; named provisional prime minister
