The history of Lithuania

Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states, was the last pagan country in Europe and, in the fourteenth century, the largest. Its grand dukes built a realm that stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea, joined it to Poland through a royal marriage in 1385, and shared a commonwealth with the Poles for more than two centuries. Partitioned into the Russian Empire in 1795, Lithuanians kept their language alive through decades of repression and declared independence in 1918. The Second World War brought Soviet annexation, German occupation and the near-total destruction of Lithuania's Jewish community, followed by half a century of Soviet rule. In 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to break away, and it has been a member of NATO and the European Union since 2004.

The first people arrived in the second half of the tenth millennium BCE, following the reindeer herds north as the glaciers melted. For thousands of years the inhabitants lived by hunting, fishing and gathering in the forests and along the lakes and rivers. Pottery appeared in the Neolithic, but farming spread slowly and only became important in the third millennium BCE, around the time that the Corded Ware culture, often linked with the arrival of Indo-European speakers, reached the region. Amber from the Baltic coast was traded south over long distances, and in Roman times it travelled along the so-called Amber Road to the Mediterranean.

The ancestors of the Lithuanians were Balts, a group of peoples whose languages survive today only in Lithuanian and Latvian. Lithuanian is famous among linguists for preserving many archaic features of the ancient Indo-European language family. In the first millennium CE the Baltic tribes included the Old Prussians and Yotvingians in the west and south, the Curonians and Semigallians to the north, and the Lithuanians and Samogitians along the Neman river. They lived in hill forts and farmsteads, cremated their dead and worshipped gods of thunder, the sky and the earth, such as Perkūnas. The name Lithuania first appears in 1009, when a German chronicle recorded that the missionary Bruno of Querfurt had been killed on its borders.

In the twelfth century Lithuanian war bands raided their neighbours, including the Rus' principalities that had once taken tribute from them, and the wealth and captives they brought back helped a warrior elite to form. Early in the thirteenth century two German crusading orders, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights, began conquering the pagan peoples of the eastern Baltic. In 1236 the Samogitians destroyed the Sword Brothers at the Battle of Saule, and the survivors merged into the Teutonic Order, which ruled Prussia as the State of the Teutonic Order.

Facing the crusaders, the Lithuanian chiefs drew together under Mindaugas, who by the 1240s ruled most of the country. To divide his enemies he accepted baptism in 1251 and was crowned king in 1253 with the pope's approval. He later broke with the Order, and in 1263 he was murdered by rivals. A period of civil war followed, but the state survived. Lithuania also suffered raids from the Golden Horde, the Mongol state that had overrun Kievan Rus' after the Mongol invasion.

From the 1290s a new dynasty took power, named after its greatest member, Gediminas (ruled about 1315 to 1341). In 1323 he wrote to German towns and religious orders inviting merchants and craftsmen to settle in his lands, letters that contain the first mention of Vilnius as his capital. While holding off the Teutonic Knights in the west, Gediminas and his sons expanded east into the Rus' lands left weak by Mongol rule, taking much of what is now Belarus and parts of Ukraine.

His sons Algirdas and Kęstutis divided the work of ruling: Algirdas pushed east and south, defeating the Tatars at the Battle of Blue Waters around 1362 and taking Kyiv, while Kęstutis defended the west against the Order's yearly campaigns. By the late fourteenth century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest state in Europe. Most of its people were Orthodox Christian Ruthenians, and the language of its chancery was a form of Old Ruthenian, but its rulers and core lands remained pagan.

After Algirdas's death his son Jogaila fought a civil war with his uncle Kęstutis, who died in captivity in 1382, and with Kęstutis's son Vytautas. In 1385 Jogaila agreed in the Union of Krewo to accept Catholic baptism, convert his people and marry the young Polish queen Jadwiga. Crowned King of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło in 1386, he founded the Jagiellonian dynasty, which ruled both countries for nearly two centuries. The baptism of Lithuania proper began in 1387; Samogitia followed in 1413.

Jogaila soon accepted Vytautas as ruler of Lithuania, and under Vytautas the Grand Duchy reached its height. His attempt to dominate the steppe ended in defeat by the Tatars at the Vorskla river in 1399, but in 1410 the joint Polish and Lithuanian army crushed the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grunwald, one of the largest battles of medieval Europe. The peace of 1422 fixed a border with Prussia that lasted, with few changes, until the twentieth century. Vytautas brought Tatars and Karaites to settle in Lithuania, and their descendants still live around Trakai. He died in 1430 while awaiting a royal crown.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Grand Duchy and Poland were ruled together most of the time while keeping separate governments, armies and laws. Lithuanian nobles gained privileges similar to those of the Polish nobility, and the three Statutes of Lithuania of 1529, 1566 and 1588 gave the country one of the most advanced law codes in Europe. But the rising power of Muscovy, later the Tsardom of Russia, took the eastern lands piece by piece.

Pressed by war with Russia, Lithuania agreed to a closer union. The Union of Lublin of 1569 created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a single elected king and a shared parliament, though Lithuania kept its own title, treasury, army and laws. On the eve of the union Poland took the Ukrainian lands of the Grand Duchy, including Kyiv. The Commonwealth was a large, religiously diverse state governed largely by its nobility, which elected its kings after the Jagiellonian line ended in 1572.

The Reformation won many Lithuanian magnates, and the first book in Lithuanian, a Lutheran catechism by Martynas Mažvydas, was printed in Königsberg in 1547. The Catholic Counter-Reformation, led by the Jesuits, won most of them back; the Jesuit academy founded in Vilnius in 1579 became Vilnius University. Over these centuries the Lithuanian nobility adopted the Polish language and culture, while Lithuanian remained the speech of the peasants, who were tied to the land as serfs. Vilnius also became one of the great centres of Jewish life in Europe, later known as the "Jerusalem of the North".

The seventeenth century brought disaster. In the war of 1654 to 1667 Russian armies took and burned Vilnius, and Swedish forces occupied much of the country, a period remembered as the Deluge. Plague and famine during the Great Northern War in the early eighteenth century killed a large part of the population again. The Commonwealth grew weak, its parliament often paralysed and its politics manipulated by neighbouring powers. Reformers passed the Constitution of 3 May 1791, but Catherine the Great of Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the Commonwealth in three partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795. Almost all of Lithuania passed to the Russian Empire, while the Lithuanian-speaking lands along the coast, known as Lithuania Minor, remained under Prussia.

Napoleon entered Vilnius in 1812 on his way to Moscow, and many Lithuanians hoped in vain that he would restore their state. The nobility rose against Russian rule with the Poles in 1830 to 1831 and again in 1863 to 1864. After the first uprising the tsarist government closed Vilnius University; after the second it launched a campaign of Russification and in 1864 banned the printing of Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet. Lithuanian books were printed in Prussia instead and carried across the border by book smugglers, the knygnešiai, who risked prison or exile to Siberia.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861, and a class of literate peasant farmers emerged whose sons became the priests, doctors and writers of a national movement. The newspaper Aušra, founded in 1883 by Jonas Basanavičius, promoted a modern Lithuanian identity based on the language rather than the old Polish-speaking nobility. The press ban was lifted in 1904, and in 1905 the Great Seimas of Vilnius demanded autonomy. Poverty pushed many people to emigrate, especially to the United States, and Lithuanian-speaking regions were still overwhelmingly rural, while the towns were home to large Jewish and Polish populations.

German armies occupied Lithuania in 1915 during the First World War. In September 1917 a conference in Vilnius elected the Council of Lithuania, and on 16 February 1918 the Council, chaired by Basanavičius, proclaimed an independent state. As Germany collapsed, the new republic fought wars against the Bolsheviks, against German-backed Russian volunteers, and against Poland, which claimed Vilnius. In October 1920 the Polish general Lucjan Żeligowski seized the city in a staged "mutiny", and it was annexed to Poland in 1922. Kaunas became the temporary capital, and Lithuania refused relations with Poland for nearly two decades.

In 1923 Lithuania took the Klaipėda (Memel) region, a former German territory under French-led League of Nations administration, giving it a port on the Baltic. The early republic was a parliamentary democracy that carried out land reform and introduced the litas currency, but in December 1926 a military coup brought Antanas Smetona to power, and he ruled as an authoritarian president until 1940. In 1938 Poland forced Lithuania by ultimatum to restore diplomatic relations, and in March 1939 Nazi Germany demanded and received Klaipėda.

The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 placed Lithuania in the Soviet sphere. In October 1939 the Soviet Union gave Vilnius, which it had taken from Poland, back to Lithuania in return for stationing troops in the country. In June 1940 a Soviet ultimatum was followed by full occupation; after staged elections, Lithuania was annexed to the Soviet Union as a Soviet republic in August. Arrests followed, and in June 1941 more than 12,000 people were deported to Siberia.

A week later Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and an uprising by Lithuanian activists briefly declared a provisional government, which the Germans soon pushed aside. The Holocaust began almost immediately. Einsatzgruppen units, with Lithuanian auxiliary police and other collaborators, carried out mass shootings across the country, at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, in the Paneriai forest outside Vilnius, and in hundreds of small towns. Of the roughly 210,000 to 250,000 Jews in Lithuania before the war, about 90 percent or more were murdered, one of the highest proportions in Europe; most were dead by the end of 1941, and the ghettos of Vilnius and Kaunas were liquidated by 1944. Some Lithuanians sheltered Jews at great risk, while the anti-German resistance remained largely non-violent.

The Red Army returned in 1944. Joseph Stalin re-established the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic with Vilnius as its capital, and most of the city's surviving Poles were moved to Poland. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians took to the forests as partisans, the "Forest Brothers", and fought Soviet forces until 1953, a guerrilla war that cost tens of thousands of lives. Between 1944 and 1953 nearly 120,000 people, about 5 percent of the population, were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, many during the forced collectivisation of farming in 1948 and 1949. Western governments, including the United States, never formally recognised the annexation.

After Stalin's death, Lithuania was industrialised and its cities grew, but the Communist Party controlled all public life and the Catholic Church was persecuted. The underground Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania documented abuses from 1972, the year that the student Romas Kalanta burned himself to death in Kaunas in protest at Soviet rule. Immigration from other republics was smaller than in Latvia and Estonia, and Lithuanian remained the main language of the republic.

Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms allowed the Reform Movement of Lithuania, Sąjūdis, to form in 1988. On 23 August 1989 about two million people joined hands with Latvians and Estonians in the Baltic Way, a human chain from Vilnius through Riga to Tallinn, marking fifty years since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. After Sąjūdis won the elections of early 1990, the Supreme Council under Vytautas Landsbergis declared the restoration of independence on 11 March 1990, the first Soviet republic to do so.

Moscow responded with an economic blockade and, in January 1991, with military force. On the night of 13 January Soviet troops stormed the Vilnius television tower, killing 14 unarmed civilians, but crowds defending the parliament held their ground. A referendum in February showed overwhelming support for independence. After the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, Lithuania was recognised by the Soviet Union on 6 September and joined the United Nations, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A new constitution was adopted by referendum in 1992, and the last Russian troops left on 31 August 1993. The transition to a market economy was painful, and political power alternated between the former communists of Algirdas Brazauskas and the conservatives descended from Sąjūdis. Lithuania joined NATO in March 2004 and the European Union on 1 May 2004, entered the Schengen area in 2007 and adopted the euro in 2015. Rapid growth after accession was followed by a deep recession in 2009, and large-scale emigration has reduced the population.

Relations with Russia and Belarus have dominated security policy. Lithuania borders both Belarus and the Russian exclave around Kaliningrad, and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it became one of Ukraine's strongest supporters. Vilnius hosted a NATO summit in July 2023, and in April 2025 Germany activated an armoured brigade in Lithuania, its first permanent brigade-sized deployment abroad since the Second World War. President Gitanas Nausėda, first elected in 2019, won a second term in May 2024. The Social Democrats won the parliamentary election of October 2024; their first prime minister, Gintautas Paluckas, resigned in August 2025 amid financial scandals, his successor Inga Ruginienė left office in July 2026 after the governing coalition broke down, and Mindaugas Sinkevičius became prime minister on 14 July 2026.