Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The Grand Duchy of Finland was the first region to declare independence from the Russian Empire in the final stages of the First World War. However, the declaration of independence in December 1917 was insufficient, and Finland fought a war of independence until the country’s sovereignty and its democratic political system were finally secured. The fiercest phase of the war was in the spring of 1918. The main parties were, on one hand, the Finnish left, which received support from the Russian Bolsheviks, and on the other hand, the non-socialist groups supported by Germany. The German armed forces played a significant role in the fact that the war ended with the victory of the Finnish democratic government. Previous research has investigated thoroughly the details of the military operations by the German forces, but the role and importance of the German armed forces in the overall picture of the war has received relatively little attention. This article analyses in more detail what kind of contribution the German troops made. There are indications that their importance was greater than most scholars have estimated.

Works of fiction and memoirs relating to the First World War written in the Lithuanian language or by Lithuanian authors have so far not been a preoccupation of Lithuanian literary scholars. Due to the breadth of the topic, the analysis in this article is limited to the most important works of fiction and witnesses’ memories of the Great War. The first fictional and documentary works analysed in the article were written during the war itself, the last at the beginning of the Second World War. There is quite a large and very varied (from the point of view of artistic quality) amount of this kind of literature. Using methods of narratology and comparison, the author sets out to analyse the main themes, plots and possible influences, while placing the writings in the history of Lithuanian literature.

When examining the causes of the revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire, and the course it took, we always face not only social but also national factors. The resolution of national aspirations was intertwined with the social aspirations of the revolution, and we have to admit that national mobilisation would often lose to social mobilisation. This paper shows the interaction between those factors, mainly on the basis of the Ukrainian and Transcaucasian cases, and reveals how the development of events on national peripheries directly affected events at the centre, and vice versa. The social explosion of 1917 that broke out in Imperial Petrograd was echoed by a national mobilisation that forced the centre to make concessions to the peripheries. The subsequent success of the Bolsheviks, and the national disintegration on the peripheries, was affected by the balance created between the unique social project and national factors, as well as the readiness not to block the way to national sovereignty and cultures, provided governance in the national area was arranged in compliance with the Soviet model.

In the course of the First World War, ‘the nationalities question’ exploded in Eastern Europe. By the fall of 1918, the Eastern Europe of the three empires had collapsed, and national states were rising. During the war, the nationalities question as perceived in Switzerland, a neutral country, had developed from an initial concern about the loyalty of the minorities in the borderlands of the three East European empires into a battle royal for recognition as individual states. The article focuses on the activities of the German ambassador in Bern who was the most active force in the development, and he gave special support for the nationalities on Russia’s western border. Poland’s future quickly became the major issue but this threatened Germany’s own ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Lithuanians and the Ukrainians particularly opposed Polish dreams of establishing a large state. The Germans, however, considered the future of Ukraine to lie mostly in the hands of the Austrian Empire, and therefore Lithuania appeared to be the more promising force to limit any new Polish state.

In the evaluation of the goals of the countries that fought in the First World War, one of the most persistent stereotypes testifies to the particular aggressiveness of the Kaiser’s Germany, and its exclusive role in the outbreak of the war. This opinion is directly related to Lithuania, when it comes to the expansionist approach of Germany with respect to the western border zones of the Russian Empire. The paper looks for the origins of these historiographic stereotypes, by analysing how the goals of Germany in the First World War were presented in Soviet historiography, and, in a broader sense, in socialist bloc historiography; and how Lithuanian historiography in the period of restored independence has been impacted by the approaches of foreign researchers. After looking at studies of recent resonant historiographic trends with respect to the military aims of the Kaiser’s Germany, and their traces in the Lithuanian study of history, the author makes an attempt to verify the validity of the statement about ‘German expansionism’ as regards Lithuania and the neighbouring region in the initial period of the war, which has been little explored in Lithuania.