Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The article deals with the labour migration of peasants from Vilnius, Kaunas and Suwałki governorates across the Russian Empire before the First World War. Peasant migrants were issued with the necessary identity documents by the local peasant self-government institutions. The social portrait of a peasant migrant from the Lithuanian governorates is presented by processing the data from the passport registers of six districts using descriptive and deductive statistical methods. Data on the distribution of migrants by gender and age is analysed, and their literacy is assessed. The procedure for renewing personal documents posed many problems for the migrants but the surviving documents of their correspondence with the local officials give information about the directions of migration and specific aspects of the migrants' daily life. The Baltic and Byelorussian governorates together with Saint Petersburg dominated among the longterm migration directions. The choice depended not only on geographical distance, but also on personal connections, which encouraged chain migration.

The article aims to explains why, among all the non-dominant ethnic groups, the imperial authorities in the so-called Western region allowed the existence of only the Lithuanian educational society ‘Saulė’ [The Sun]. The argument is made that this was due to the recognition of Kaunas governorate as a Lithuanian ‘national territory’ on the Russian mental map, the lack of assimilation potential (from the point of view of the officials), the admission that the Lithuanians were ethnically-culturally detached from the ethnic Russians, as well as the efforts of the governor of Kaunas, Piotr Verevkin, to prevent the closure of this society. Part of the article is devoted to a discussion of Verevkin’s motives.

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’.