Petras Klimas – Between Smetona and Steponas Kairys

chapter 3 Petras Klimas – Between Smetona and Steponas Kairys

At the very beginning of the war in August 1914 the most active Vilnius Lithuanian activists formed aid societies important for all Lithuania. Smetona was one of the founders of the Lithuanian Society to Help Those Suffering from War, which was formed on September 27, 1914. This society replaced the Lithuanian Provisional Committee to Help War Sufferers that had been func- tioning since August 11, 1914. Smetona was Vice-Chairman of the group. Literate people, journalists, no matter whether priests or lay, sharing or opposing his thoughts, drew Smetona like a magnet. One of these was Petras Klimas, who had studied law in St. Petersburg and was already known as a col- laborator in the youth newspaper Aušrinė (Morning Star). In political sympa- thies he leaned toward the Social Democrats but never joined them; he argued well with the conservative priests. Smetona knew him from the activity of the Lithuanian Scientific Society, and when Klimas, having finished his studies, settled in Vilnius in 1914, he very quickly came into Smetona’s range of vision. In the years of the German occupation, Klimas was one of the most active Lithuanians, participating in relief work and writing handbooks for Lithuanian schools, and he became chairman of the textbooks commission. Klimas is especially important for us in this story not just because he worked closely with Smetona during the war, but also because he kept a diary in which he rather critically and even at times scornfully recorded not just important moments of Lithuanian life and activity in Vilnius, but also personal observa- tions of the activities of the most prominent Lithuanians, leaving a very important historical source for that time. He later wrote memoirs. In the summer of 1915, after stopping the Russian army’s invasion of East Prussia, the Germans quickly marched eastward and occupied Lithuania virtually without opposition. The German command of the East Front – Oberbefehlshaber Ost or OberOst for short – established its headquarters in Kaunas. On September 18 the Germans occupied Vilnius, and the next day they issued a proclamation calling Vilnius (“Wilna” in Polish) a “Polish” city. When the Lithuanians protested, the Germans corrected that, but the invad- ers introduced a harsh occupation regime, administered by OberOst, dividing Lithuania into districts and counties and imposing huge requisitions of various products on the farmers. Gendarmes organized everything to detail, the

Petras Klimas – Between Smetona And Steponas Kairys 51 press was forbidden, Lithuanian organizations and societies could not func- tion. All of that forced the leaders of Lithuanian societies to struggle more assertively for their rights. With the Russian Empire’s failures at the front, the question of Lithuania’s political future rose to the fore. The pro-tsarist line in Lithuanian society (Yčas and others who had moved eastward with the retreating tsarist forces) could not interest the tsarist authorities, and Russian political parties promised nothing in the question of the future of the Lithuanian nation. Smetona, on the other hand, began to orient himself toward Germany, patiently seeking ways to raise the question of creating a Lithuanian state in the future with Germany’s help. To be sure, the harsh occupation regime by the German mili- tary administration offered little hope for the Lithuanians for the time being. But while Germany appeared strong and very capable of emerging victorious from the war, the leaders of Lithuanian political parties began to penetrate the political combinations of the ruling circles in Germany. National movements in all empires were looking for grounds on which to build goals of autonomy and independence, and the warring powers used the slogan of national self-determination against each other – even the Russian Social Democrats (Bolsheviks) seized on this. Since the time of the Vilnius Seimas in 1905, Lithuanian political currents and groups (later parties) had in one way or another talked of Lithuanian statehood, in most cases calling for autonomy. Smetona now began to come up with new thoughts and tactics for gaining German support for the idea of Lithuania’s independence from Russia. Each group of the Lithuanian intelligentsia developed its own political ori- entation. The liberal and democratic currents and parties sought the formation of an independent Lithuanian state.117 Lithuanian Bolsheviks, on the other hand, pointed first of all to the problem of social freedom and did not seek independence or statehood. Russian Bolshevik leaders, however, well understood the significance of such processes. V.I. Lenin asserted that in the life of a nation the concentration of national spheres of life (the revival of the language, national awakening, etc.) and the formation of a nation state were natural developments: “In the entire civilized world, a national state is typical for normal capitalist period.”118 But he did not yet realize that national states would stop Bolshevism’s campaign into Europe and the Bolsheviks’ planned world socialist revolution, or that his government too would have to recog- nize nations that had determined their own fate, including independent Lithuania. When the war began, representatives of various Lithuanian parties put together an informal Lithuanian political center; the Social Democrats at first did not participate. The center did not have a firm number of members, or an