The Elections

XII The Elections “Honestly speaking, I cannot imagine how it is possible to organize elections under the conditions of occupation by foreign forces.” —Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, December 7, 2004 “By choosing the very best, most reliable sons of labor, the Unified Labor Front comes to our aid so that all sorts of agents of chauvinism and capitalism do not get into the Seimas.” —election oratory “Whoever does not vote is voting for the enemy.” —Tiesa,July8,1940 On July 5, the council of ministers, under the direction of Paleckis and Dekanozov, agreed to schedule elections for a new parliament, and the announcement appeared in the next day’s newspapers. The citizenry would vote on July 14, just nine days away, to elect a “People’s Seimas.” Although not announced as such, the People’s Seimas would have the power of a constituent assembly—it would proclaim a new form of government, establish a new definition of “national independence,” and approve the nationalization of banks, large industries and land. It would send a delegation to Moscow to apply for membership in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It would go on to adopt a constitution, all without resorting to any formal participation by the population of Lithuania or for that matter requiring any formal action by the People’s Government. Organized demonstrations would suffice. None of this, to be sure, was specifically mentioned in the campaign before the election; the process, however, closely followed the Politburo’s announced plan for the incorporation of the Belarusian and Ukrainian lands in the fall of 1939, as discussed above in chapter I. Announcing the coming election, ELTA director Kostas Korsakas announced that Lithuanians must “elect a Seimas that would be worthy of liberated reborn Lithuania and that would set our country’s path into a new, bright future.”376 With calling for elections the government essentially completed its part in introducing the Soviet system to Lithuania. Paleckis, as the head of government, signed the decree announcing the elections and also the decree establishing new election rules, and his role in public affairs dwindled sharply to that of giving inspiring speeches. He and his government still had a function in Dekanozov’s “shell game,” namely drawing attention away from the growing power of the Lithuanian Communist Party, but it was the party, with Dekanozov’s guidance, that now drove and directed the process of incorporating Lithuania into the Soviet Union. 206 Alfred Erich Senn Many foreign observers had long anticipated that the election and the meeting of the People’s Seimas would probably lead to Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, but the United States minister, Owen Norem, predicted the demise of the Paleckis government only on July 17, after the election: “Few observers believe that it will survive the ordeal of the Seimas election with the subsequent demand for inclusion into the USSR... Mr. Paleckis and others in his cabinet are known to have strong desires to safeguard the freedom of Lithuania. The Prime Minister and Acting President is reported to have had a fit in which he declared vehemently that he would not sell Lithuania.” Norem praised the government’s work in expanding health care, advocating land reform, and purging the educational system of denominational distinction, but he foresaw that it would have to yield to the Soviet force majeure.377 Lithuania’s diplomats abroad, influenced by Škirpa’s memorandum of July 1, also understood that Lithuania was heading toward annexation, but they could do nothing. Krėvė had informed them all that the new government was working normally, and Krėvė could publicly say nothing to the contrary even after his visit to Moscow. On July 4 Lozoraitis traveled to Berlin secretly to consult with Škirpa, and soon thereafter he sent a message to other Lithuanian diplomats that if the People’s Seimas should vote for incorporation into the USSR, they should protest to their host governments. When Krėvė, on July 6, called the diplomats home for new instructions, they all expected that they would not be able to return to their posts; all pleaded illness and refused to travel.378 For the moment, the diplomats could only watch as the regime in Kaunas staged its campaign to show that the people approved not just of its past actions but also of its future direction. The party was now taking over the reins of power, working through the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Antanas Sniečkus’s Saugumas apparatus. With Dekanozov’s guidance, it had drawn up the rules for the elections. Forty years later, in a meeting in the Lithuanian Institute of Party History in Vilnius, Vladas Niunka, a member of the party’s Central Committee, reminisced that in June 1940, several weeks before the election, the party’s Central Committee had given him 12 hours to prepare the rules for voting. On July 4, LCP leaders met with their Soviet mentors at the Soviet embassy to finalize plans. At Dekanozov’s insistence, they agreed to stamp passports at the polling booths so as to increase the pressure on the citizenry to come vote. Although Niunka argued that he needed three weeks to prepare for the elections, Dekanozov, in the words of one participant in the meeting, “categorically demanded” elections in 10 days in order to walk in lockstep with Latvia and Estonia. The Paleckis government dutifully approved the arrangements and appointed Niunka chairman of the Election Commission.379 The new election rules offer considerable material for consideration of “form and substance” in legislation as well as elections; the eventual election results that the regime announced ignored the rules that it had itself.

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