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’.