Lietuvos istorijos metraštis

The paper focuses on an extract from the treasury archive of Vilnius Lower Castle from the 1640s. The research provides new data on the sociotopography of a part of the city of Vilnius and the suburb of Antakalnis (Antokol) in 1566 and reveals the fate of some documents kept in the treasury archive after 1655, when the Russian army occupied Vilnius and a fire ravaged the archive. The extract, which is published for the first time in this article, is included in the appendix.

In the article, the genesis of the first Lithuanian socio-political newspaper Aušra (Auszra) is associated with the Eastern crisis (1876–1878). The political aspirations of the Aušra are verified in the context of the Russia-England (Olga Novikova–William Gladstone) discourse.

The article explains why, in 1909, there appeared instigations in Russian public discourse calling for closure of the Lithuanian Catholic educational society ‘Saulė’ (The Sun), and at the same time criticism was directed at the governor of Kaunas, who supposedly was the patron of this association. This action of Russian nationalist is interpreted as a reflection of the empirewide struggle against non-Russian public organisations. It was Russian public figures and civil servants promoting a nationalistic nationality policy who wanted to close the ‘Saulė’.

The article examines and discusses the diplomatic activities and accomplishments of Jurgis Baltrušaitis, the long-standing envoy of Lithuania to the Soviet Union. The study is focused on several problematic moments of the envoy’s work in Moscow, especially the unique environment in which Baltrušaitis’s geopolitical views took shape and which later seemed to have influenced his diplomatic activities. The archival materials used in the article (they include Baltrušaitis’s political reports and his diplomatic correspondence) reveal the Lithuanian envoy’s controversial position regarding relations with the USSR. The study also discusses Baltrušaitis’s tense relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the reasons for the constant conflicts with the leadership of Lithuania, analyses the algorithms of the envoy’s communications with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and provides an assessment of the results of the ‘geopolitical mission’ that Jurgis Baltrušaitis aspired to achieve.

The article presents the political decisions affecting associations and the ideological attitudes underlying them in Lithuania during the 1930s. The 1936 Law on Associations narrowed the autonomy of voluntary associations creating a need for the government to argue for intervention in the affairs of associations. The leaders of the authoritarian regime relied on the idea of organised society based on close cooperation between associations and the state. The article explores the concept of organised society and its links with corporatism, and looks at the plans of the authorities to reform associations. The aim is to assess the extent to which political decisions affecting associations, the idea of organised society, and corporatism were against or in line with the ideals of civil society.

The article focuses on the activities of the Lithuanian Union of Political Prisoners of the Anti-Nazi Resistance in Germany and the USA, an organisation that has not been studied in the historiography so far. It was founded in 1946 to care for the repressed participants of the