Encyclopedia of Russian History

Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200. London: Longman. Noonan, Thomas S. (1997). “Scandinavians in European Russia.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, ed. Peter Sawyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pritsak, Omeljan. (1981). The Origin of Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Stalsberg, Anne. (1988). “The Scandinavian Viking Age Finds in Rus: Overview and Analysis.” In Bericht der R?misch-Germanischen Kommission 69. Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Philipp Von Zabern.

HEIDI M. SHERMAN

VILNIUS

The capital of the Lithuanian Republic and historically the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilnius occupies a special place in a number of national cultures. Lithuanians constitute a majority of the city’s 543,000 inhabitants. Russians make

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up about 20 percent, Poles 19 percent, Belarusians 5 percent, and Jews 2 percent. Jews, who according to the Russian census of 1897 had constituted a plurality of the population, have called “Vilna” (or in Yiddish “Vilne”) the “Jerusalem of the North,” a center of rabbinic learning. Poles considered “Wilno” Polish in culture. Some Belarusians, pointing to the Grand Duchy’s multinational character, insist that Vilna should be part of their state. Under Russian rule in the nineteenth century, Vilna was the administrative center of the empire’s Northwest Region.

When the great Eastern European empires collapsed at the end of the World War I, Vilnius became a bone of contention between the newly emerging states. Between 1918 and 1923, the flag symbolizing sovereignty over the city and region changed at least eight times. The two major contenders were Lithuania and Poland, although the city also briefly served as the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and then the Lithuanian-Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. In July 1920, as part of its recognition of Lithuanian independence, Soviet Russia agreed with Lithuania’s claims to Vilnius, but in October 1920 Polish forces seized the city, establishing the rogue state of Central Lithuania. In 1923, Poland formally incorporated the territory, but Lithuania refused to recognize Polish sovereignty. Still claiming Vilnius as their capital, the Lithuanians called Kaunas their provisional capital and insisted that Poland and Lithuania were in a state of war.

After Soviet forces had occupied Eastern Poland in September 1939, the Soviet government turned Vilnius over to the Lithuanians. The Polish government in exile protested the Lithuanians’ move into Vilnius, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the western powers chose not to challenge the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland. In 1940, and again from 1944 to 1945, Soviet troops occupied Lithuania, and Vilnius was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991.

Under Soviet rule, Lithuanians dominated the city’s cultural life. Before World War I, when Lithuania lay on the border between Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany, the Russians had limited the economic growth of the region and the development of the city. Therefore few Lithuanians had come to the city from the countryside. After 1945 the Soviet government permitted and even encouraged Poles to emigrate from the USSR to the Polish People’s Republic, and Lithuanians flowed to the city. The decade of the 1960s, when the

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Lithuanian population reached 45 to 47 percent, was decisive in the development of the city’s Lithuanian character.

In January 1991 Soviet troops in Vilnius seized a number of public buildings in an unsuccessful effort to crush Lithuanian independence, and the city became a symbol of the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika. See also: JEWS; LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; POLAND

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Israel. (1992). Vilna. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1966). The Great Powers, Lithuania, and the Vilna Question. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.

ALFRED ERICH SENN VINIUS, ANDREI DENISOVICH See WINIUS, ANDRIES DIONYSZOON.

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