Darius Staliūnas

Yoko Aoshima

This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery this challenge, was most prevalent in twelve provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, as well as to the Kingdom of Poland. At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist. The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, as well as the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.

Dilemmas of Nationalization in Russia's Western Borderlands, 1905-1915

The Tsar, The Empire, and The Nation

Vladas Sirutavičius

Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.

Jewish-Lithuanian political cooperation at the beginning of the 20th century

A Pragmatic Alliance

Alvydas Nikzentaitis

Alvydas Nikžentaitis

Stefan Schreiner

The Lithuanian Jews, Litvaks, played an important and unique role not only within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but in a wider context of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe, too. The changing world around them at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth had a profound impact not only on the Jewish communities, but also on a parallel world of the “others,” that is, those who lived with them side by side. Exploring and demonstrating this development from various angles is one of the themes and objectives of this book. Another is the analysis of the Shoah, which ended the centuries of Jewish culture in Lithuania: a world of its own had vanished within months. This book, therefore, “recalls” that vanished world. In doing so, it sheds new light on what has been lost.The papers presented in this collection were delivered at the international conferences in Nida (1997) and Telšiai (2001), Lithuania. Participants came from Israel, the USA, Great Britain, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Germany, and Lithuania.

The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews

Making Russians is an innovative study dealing with Russian nationalities policy in Lithuania and Belarus in the aftermath of the 1863 Uprising. The book devotes most attention to imperial confessional and language policy, for in Russian discourse at that time it was religion and language that were considered to be the most important criteria determining nationality. The account of Russian nationalities policy presented here differs considerably from the assessments usually offered by historians from east-central Europe primarily because the author provides a more subtle description of the aims of imperial nationalities policy, rejecting the claim that the Russian authorities consistently sought to assimilate members of other national groups. At the same time the interpretation this study offers opens a discussion with western and Russian historians, especially those, who lay heavy emphasis on discourse analysis. This study asserts that the rhetoric of officials and certain public campaigners was influenced by a concept of political correctness, which condemned all forms of ethnic denationalisation. A closer look at the implementation of discriminatory policy allows us to discern within Russian imperial policy more attempts to assimilate or otherwise repress the cultures of non-dominant national groups than it is possible to appreciate simply by analysing discourse alone.

Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus After 1863

Making Russians

Dotyczy stosunków ekonomicznych na terenie Rzeczpospolitej w granicach przedrozbiorowych w XVIII-XX wieku.

tarp tarpininko ir konkurento

Žydai Lietuvos ekonominėje-socialinėje struktūroje

Dangiras Mačiulis

1883 - 1940

Lithuanian Nationalism and the Vilnius Question

Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė

This book aims to create an integral picture of the social, economic and cultural history of the Jews in Lithuania during the course of more than six hundred years - from the Middle Ages to the 1990s. It is a translation of the study "Lietuvos žydai. Istorinė studija" (Engl. "Lithuanian Jews. Historical study"), published in Lithuanian in 2012. The Book was written by an interna-tional group of scholars from Lithuania, Israel, the United States of America and Germany. The world of Lithuanian Jewry is reconstructed through different aspects of the development of community and society: demography, social and economic activity, self-government institutions of the community, cultural and religious movements, literature and the press, education, discriminative policy of the authorities and relations with the dominant church, segregation, assimilation and changes of identity, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

Darius Staliūnas

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