Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

In May 1926, a coup took place in the Republic of Poland, which resulted in Józef Piłsudski, head of state (Naczelnik Państwa) in the period 1918–1922, taking over actual power in the country. Among other things, those three days in the streets of Warsaw stood out by the fact that during them Polish soldiers confronted each other: some military units partly supported President Stanisław Wojciechowski and the constitutional government of Wincent Witos, while others backed the plans of the first marshal of Poland, who could already boast a rather ‘whitewashed’ image among the population. Piłsudski’s plans were initially limited to the idea of forcing the resignation of the Cabinet, but finally turned into a broader campaign for the takeover of power, during which 379 people died and over 900 were wounded. The paper covers the sequence of events on 12–14 May, and focuses specifically on the role of army officers and units at different stages in the coup.

The paper examines a little-known unsuccessful attempt at a military coup in Poland in January 1919. The idea attracted notable members of the Polish National Committee, including Stanisław Grabski, and members of other right-wing organisations. Colonel Marian Januszajtis-Żegota took up the leadership at the military level, and Eustachy Sapieha at the political level. The coup was directed against the government led by the socialist Jędrzej Edward Moraczewski. The paper shows the political context of the uprising, the process, and the circumstances of its failure.

After the Evangelical-dominated Territory of Memel (the Klaipėda Region) had been integrated into the Republic of Lithuania in 1923, the issue of the situation of the Catholics, non-dominant religious group in the region, accounting for 5 per cent of its population in 1925, had to be solved. In 1926, they were separated from the Diocese of Warmia, and joined the newly formed Klaipėda Prelature, part of the Diocese of Telšiai. Thus, the Catholics of the Klaipėda Region were integrated into Church structures controlled from Lithuania, unlike the Evangelicals, who remained part of the composition of the Prussian Evangelical Church. This paper, mainly on the basis of ecclesiastical documents, presents for the first time a broader analysis of the structure of the Catholic Church and its activities in the Klaipėda Region, as part of Lithuania, in the years 1923 to 1939.

During the struggle for Lithuania’s independence, defence and guerrilla units started forming in the countryside, and fought against the Bermontian and Soviet forces and gangs of marauders. In 1919, intellectuals and public servants from Kaunas formed a sports-military guerrilla organisation, and called it the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (LRU). The organisation accepted not only new members, but also people who had already fought with guerrilla units in northeast Lithuania. Therefore, the ranks of the LRU grew rapidly, and the new paramilitary organisation played an important role in the struggle for Lithuania’s statehood. The LRU was active throughout the interwar period, until 11 July 1940, when, after the Soviet occupation, it was officially disbanded. This paper deals with issues of the scope and structure of the LRU, which until now have hardly been dealt with in historiography. The paper has three objectives: 1) it tries to establish changes in the numbers of riflemen in the interwar period, as well as the numbers of people who belonged to the LRU in different periods, and their total number throughout the interwar period; 2) the ethnic, religious and social composition of the Riflemen’s Union is analysed, with the aim of developing ‘a social portrait of a rifleman’; and 3) the internal structure of the Union is addressed: the numbers of reserve and combatant riflemen.

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.