Communist Party of Lithuania
리투아니아 공산당
The communist party of Lithuania, whose founding congress met in Vilnius in early October 1918. It worked illegally in independent Lithuania from 1920 to 1940, and after the Soviet annexation of 1940 it was merged into the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and became the sole ruling party of the Lithuanian SSR. It declared its independence from the CPSU in December 1989, and the faction that stayed loyal to the CPSU was banned on 23 August 1991.
In depth
The party's predecessor was the Lithuanian section of the RSDLP(b), organised in the autumn of 1917, and the largest contribution to its becoming a separate party came from Vincas Kapsukas and Zigmas Angarietis of the section's central bureau. After the founding congress of early October 1918, the Vilnius Soviet formed the Provisional Revolutionary Workers' and Peasants' Government under Kapsukas on 8 December, and on 16 December that government proclaimed the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. When the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Litbel) was formed in February 1919, the party merged in March with the Belorussian communists into the Communist Party of Lithuania and Belorussia, with Kapsukas elected chairman of its central committee.
After the fall of the Soviet republics the party worked illegally from 1920 to 1940. Some of its members stood in the 1922 parliamentary election as the "Workers' Groups", winning 5.0 per cent (about 40,000 votes) and five seats, but lost half of that support in 1923. From 1921 to 1940 the party was the Lithuanian section of the Comintern, represented on its Executive Committee from July 1921 by Angarietis.
At the time of the Soviet annexation in 1940 the party was headed by Antanas Sniečkus; it was merged into the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as the Communist Party of Lithuania (Bolsheviks) and readopted its old name in 1952. The first secretary of its central committee, always a Lithuanian, was the de facto ruler of the country, while the second secretary was for most of the Soviet era a Moscow-appointed Russian. On 24 December 1989, during the Singing Revolution, the party declared its independence from the CPSU, and in 1990 its main body reorganised itself as the Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania. The pro-CPSU faction under Mykolas Burokevičius played a major role in the January Events of 1991 and was banned on 23 August 1991.