What did things look like in the Baltics between 1920 and the

Ulmanis studied agriculture at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

I always get a kick out of that. A Latvian presidential dictator was an Ag student at Nebraska.

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>>1471488
Lithuanian here.
It was pretty much our golden age.

>>1473268
Under his reign, Lithuania was the first country in the world to trial nazis, his reign was nationalistic, but not chauvinistic like for example Poland's or imperialistic like Germany or USSR.

Antanas Smetona said about our minorities: "Lithuanians are the creators of their own state and national minorities are the supporters of it. As we don't demand them to melt in our nation, so we let them have their own mother tongue, we let them communicate with their compatriots about cultural affairs. But they have to be our territorial patriots: love Lithuania, respect Lithuanian nation, be loyal to Lithuania and to comply to the order of law not from constraint, but from conscience.

In 1934, in his speech to the boy scouts, he stated that there are two different movements competing with nationalism: it's socialism, based on marxism, and racism. Racism, according to him, "does not acknowledge the equality of nations, it states, that some nations have to serve others. Racism is the law of egoism, therefore it rejects the absolute morality. It is warlike, for it the one who is stronger, is the more equal. Its purpose is war, not peace. For it, you have to blindly serve your fatherland and you can just destroy the foreign, fatherland of other people if you can".

He was a great ruler, he was the one who wanted to resist the soviets, but everyone denied that, so he had to run away and some soviet agents burnt his house in usa after the war.

>>1473282
Don't most Russians think the Balts were impoverished under endless corruption and tyranny till they were saved by the Soviets in 1940?

>>1473842
The sovietboos, maybe.
The average Russians are really good people, at least in my experience.

>>1473268

Do you care to elaborate a bit about Vilnius und Klaipeda during that time? Was there any exclusively Lithuanian urban life?

>>1473842
On the internet it appears that they do. Funny, because Lithuanians (or atleast a portion of) initialy after occupation thought so too. Infact many even welcomed soviet union. But soon deportations to Siberia, repression of everything, and realisation that SU is even more poor and backwards kicked in, and the public opinion swayed massively to the negative side. That's why many also greeted nazis with flowers (and this is very, and I mean very important here, as Nazi Germany was probably the biggest enemy if not for Poland, as they took the Memel region, while Soviet Union was viewed basically as an ally because the Vilnius region). Sadly they werent any better (at least for the Jewish population).

>>1473904
Vilnius was Wilno and in Poland, where it was kinda neglected, atleast according to former Vilnian Cheslaw Milosz. There was an urban life, I'm not sure what youre asking but I can say that the city council of of Kaunas (capital of interwar of Lithuania) at the wake of Lithuanian state consisted of 71 members: 30 Poles, 22 Jews, 12 Lithuanians, 6 Germans and one Russian. Some Lithuanised themselves later, But because It was so multicultural, the Russian language was officialy used by the council until 1929. So, there probably wasn't "exclusively Lithuanian" urban life.

>>1473904
And Klaipėda, well I've never thought about it but most local Germans, or German-Lithuanians were probably subject to soviet expulsions. I wonder how many pre war inhabitants stayed. Well, to be honest some Jews and Lithuanians did fled to Lithuania when Nazi Germany was granted Memel "back". Maybe they did come back

>>1473904
Can't really say much about Vilnius, since it was occupied by Poles at that time.

Klaipėda/Memel was pretty much the only proddie bastion in the country. The population consisted mainly of liths, but after all that time under German rule, most of them considered themselves closer to Germans than their eastern brethren and the annexation was viewed pretty controversially. There was even a phase of some of them believing that they were the "true Lithuanians" and not the "pseudo-slavs" in the east, since the Lithuania Minor region was basically the cultural and book-printing center of Lithuanians during the Tsar times.

Meanwhile, Kaunas was pretty much the only Lithuanian city at the time. Before all the nasty problems with Poland, it was pretty much a "polish" city, like Vilnius and the others. Wars with Poland and the annexation of Vilnius pretty much boomed a national and cultural revival and they Lithuanised basically overnight. Honestly, the Polish/Lithuanian/Ruthenian identity in the former PLC was a pretty interesting phenomena at the time and would make a very interesting thread, but it's neither here nor there now. A good example of it was Tadas Ivanauskas, a Lithuanian zoologist who had three brothers: politician and engineer Jerzy Iwanowski and lawyer Stanisław Iwanowski, both of whom identified as Poles and Vacłaŭ Ivanoŭski, a Belarusian politician.

>>1473984

Thank you very much for your answer. I am German, and my grandparents fled from the most eastern part of East Prussia to Schleswig-Holstein in '44.

I spent two semesters studying at Vilnius University, where I took a class on National Minorities in Lithuania during the Interwar Period (and did a little classwork on its German minority inside and outside the Memelland).
The multicultural and multi ethnic harmony came as a surprise to me (we discussed one census and its results in detail and concluded with what you have pointed out as well: that often national self-identification was very uncertain); until Hitler and Nazi Germany began to secretly seek influence in the German minority and the Kulturverein. In the end, I think it is not wrong to say that German über-nationalization made the Baltic states (as well as the rest of Eastern Europe) into the single-nation states they are today.