It’s a small but proud European republic that has fought valiantly against much bigger neighbours to secure independence. Its modern nationalist movement can be traced back to the late 19th century, sparked by a revival of its native language, culture and folklore. Now it is a stable EU democracy, where the Catholic Church has lost its grip on society following a series of sexual abuse scandals.
Any Irish reader who ploughs through Richard Butterwick’s sombre, meticulous and authoritative history of Lithuania will be struck by the similarities with this country. Those parallels, however, should not be pushed too far. Unlike Ireland, Lithuania was once a mighty empire and has undergone a bewildering variety of violent regime changes with Russians, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Belarussians and Ukrainians all playing important roles in its blood-soaked saga.
While Butterwick (a professor at University College London) has a rather plodding prose style, this is a superb piece of scholarship that distils more than 1,000 tumultuous years into a coherent 396-page narrative. He devotes about a third of it to the “successions, parliaments, confrontations, wars, alliances and reforms” that shaped the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as it expanded from Baltic shores to the Black Sea.
If you want sober, judicious accounts of how Lithuania formed a commonwealth with Poland, got swallowed up by Tsarist Russia in 1795, regained its liberty after the first World War but then endured the twin horrors of Nazi and Soviet rule, they are all present and correct here.
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Butterwick’s painstakingly researched chronicle often makes for grim reading. “1655 brought even direr calamities,” he laments in one fairly typical sentence, not long after describing how Ivan the Terrible “celebrated the fall of Polatsk [in 1563] by having the city’s Jews drowned in the icy river Dzvina”.
Thankfully, it’s also a celebration of Lithuanian resilience. Butterwick pays a glowing tribute to the Baltic Way demonstration of August 23rd, 1989, when two million people joined hands across Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to create a chain of protest against Kremlin tyranny. Within a few months, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Lithuania became the first Soviet-occupied state to strike out on its own.
Today, Lithuanians make up Ireland’s fifth-largest immigrant community – and Butterwick’s demanding but admirable book is a powerful education in why freedom means so much to them.
