Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The paper focuses on evaluations of the June 1941 uprising in historiography, and analyses aspects of its social preconditions, genesis, aims, and the composition of its participants. Particular attention is paid to an analysis of the relationship between the uprising and previous and concurrent processes in the development of Lithuanian society, and with other Second World War phenomena (collaboration with the Germans, and the Holocaust). The author argues that the uprising was the result not merely of geopolitical or ideological choices, but also of complex social processes. The preconditions for it were created by the character of the socio-political development of society in the period of the independent republic, and a direct reason was the changes in social and economic life implemented during the Soviet occupation and the repressions by the regime. Interrelationships of the membership in different professional groups and political and social organisations were factors that mobilised the insurgents.

During the interwar period in Europe, internal disturbances were not an uncommon form of domestic tension and conflict. This paper looks into the concept and characteristics of domestic disturbances in Lithuania in the period 1918 to 1940. The aim is to show the opportunities for organising such disturbances and the legal regulation of their control, including the use of the army to quell them. The legal regulation of the possibilities to use the army during the disturbances, and the situational circumstances of using troops in such cases in Lithuania, are compared with similar cases in other East-Central European countries, such as Estonia, Latvia and Poland.

The article explores various linkages between the violence of the Great War and the postwar conflict in independent Lithuania. The author focuses on several key Lithuanian paramilitary groups that emerged as a result of the collapse of the German occupying regime, the Bolshevik advance, and the ensuing power struggle in 1918 and 1919. It explores their grassroots origins, their motivation to fight, and their role in processes of forming a community, and state and nation-building. The author argues that these armed paramilitary formations contributed to the militarisation of the country’s civilian life. Having emerged in the contested peripheral regions of Lithuania, they were led by veterans of the Great War acting as independent warlords. Besides providing security for local people, these formations occasionally engaged in terror against civilians who were perceived as harmful elements that had to be purged from local communities. These paramilitary formations also showed a degree of operational freedom, by controlling certain peripheral regions for considerable periods of time. But the state was able to share its monopoly on legal violence with them only for as long as its own survival required the mobilisation of all economic and human resources for the war.

For the first time in Lithuanian historiography, this paper examines the theories of guerrilla warfare formulated by Polish military theorists, such as Karol Bogumił Stolzman, Piotr Wysocki, Henryk Kamieński and Ludwik Adam Mierosławski, and analyses the links between Polish paramilitarism and the origins of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, and the formation of the ideological views of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, given the experience of similar organisations in East-Central Europe (Sokol, Suojeuskunta), and the links between the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union and the paramilitary movements formed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The article reviews tombstone inscriptions of Klaipėda Region cemeteries of the late 19th to mid-20th c. from a linguistic viewpoint. The inscriptions are German or Lithuanian, less frequently bilingual (in German and Lithuanian on the same tombstone). The greatest attention is paid to the Lithuanian inscriptions, with the focus on their vocabulary and morphology. Moreover, the principal linguistic characteristics of personal names are discussed.