Vladas Terleckas, The Tragic Pages of Lithuanian History: 1940–1953, 4th edn (Vilnius, 2023), 148pp.

There are still very few books in English that cover in any detail the darkest chapter in modern Lithuanian history – the Nazi and Soviet invasions of the 1940s and the subsequent Stalinist era of Soviet occupation. The fourth edition of The Tragic Pages of Lithuanian History (published in 2023) is the final version of his book on this period that Vladas Terleckas (1939–2024) prepared before his death in September 2024. First published in 2014, and existing in both French and English editions, the book aimed to introduce Francophone and Anglophone readers to 20th-century Lithuanian history. Vladas Terleckas was an academic economist and the leading historian of banking in Lithuania; he was also a signatory of the Act of Restoration of Independence of the Republic of Lithuania in 1990, played a key role in the reconstitution of Lithuania’s independent banking system, and served briefly as a Deputy of Lithuania’s Supreme Council.

The Tragic Pages of Lithuanian History is a study of a nation on the brink of annihilation, and how a nation and a people can survive – and be ultimately reborn – against all odds. As Winston Churchill famously observed in May 1940, ‘Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those which surrender tamely are finished’. It is a lesson of which Ukraine reminded Europe in 2022. Ukraine has not been overwhelmed by Russia, but the situation facing Lithuania in 1940, 1941 and again in 1944 was even more dire. Hemmed in on either side by the totalitarian behemoths of the 20th century, Lithuania’s independence was snuffed out first by the Soviet Union in 1940 and then, after a brief attempt at resurgence in June 1941, by the Nazis; the Soviets then returned in 1944 to occupy the country for the next 47 years. While Terleckas offers historical background stretching back to the start of the 20th century, his book is focussed on the period 1940–1953 as the period of invasion, of the most brutal occupation, and of the partisan war that carried on after World War Two had ended elsewhere – but not for Lithuania.

Perhaps more than any other historian, Vladas Terleckas had a unique grasp of Lithuania’s interwar, wartime and postwar existence from the economic and statistical perspective, and the book is relentlessly supported by analysis of data – without at any moment compromising its readability. On the contrary, in the forest of statistics the reader is reassured that this is no romantic evocation of a nation’s spirit, but a resolutely factual analysis. History, the Soviets claimed, was simply a matter of economics – even though they impoverished Lithuania and brought economic catastrophe – so there is a certain irony to a history of Lithuania’s resistance to Communism written from an economic perspective. Terleckas seems consciously to have avoided emotive language or imagery in his history of the Nazi and Soviet efforts to degrade, brutalise, demoralise and annihilate Lithuanians; none was needed. The numbers do not lie.

At under 150 pages The Tragic Pages of Lithuanian History is a short book, but it ranges over Lithuania’s economic, military, cultural, educational and religious life during a crucial period when the Lithuanian people, faced with unimaginable violence, made the decision to continue existing. It was a collective decision underpinned by the armed resistance of the partisans, the refusal of citizens to co-operate in the structures of the Soviet state, and the endurance of the deportees. That national decision to continue existing exposed the propagandistic lie of Lithuania’s consent to incorporation in the Soviet Union; the Republic of Lithuania refused to die. But tragically, a national refusal to die did not have the power to save any individual from death, and in many cases (especially from the partisans) the nation’s decision to live entailed the ultimate sacrifice. Until I read this book, I did not realise that people in Lithuanian cities threw flowers from windows onto the trucks that were taking deportees to the cattle trucks that would carry them to forced labour and death in Siberia – a detail that makes sense of the flowers in memory of the deportees flung from the small aircraft that flew the length of the Baltic Way in 1989.

The trauma and almost unparalleled horror of Lithuania’s 20th-century history cannot be erased – and nor should it. But what Vladas Terleckas’s book shows is that blood spilled for the sake of honour, for truth, and for love of Jesus Christ does not flow in vain. In the end, the Soviet Union became so brittle and so hollowed out by the aridity of its own lies that it collapsed in on itself. The opposite was true of Lithuania, which in spite of its small size emerged from the oppression of decades of tyranny with the cultural, moral and spiritual resources to rebuild itself. Perhaps it takes an economist to remind us that a nation’s spirit is unquantifiable, its chances of survival incalculable, and its life indomitable.