Lithuania in April

The people of Lithuania unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally, to misquote Arlington Stringham. 

At one time Lithuania was the biggest country in Europe, but that was long ago.

Still, countries don't forget something like that.

And it makes me happy walking around former great powers. I feel these are my people. 

Since Russia swallowed Lithuania in the third Polish (more correctly Polish-Lithuanian) Partition she has been collateral damage in other peoples' wars.  She is trying to avoid that happening again.

What will the future be for Lithuania?

I am sure she won't be invaded by Russia, but then I was sure Ukraine wouldn't be.

History we see now has not ended. Will Lithuania's future still be prosperity and democracy, as was assumed by most people a year and a half ago ? 

Or a disaster like the one that befell Europe in 1914? 

I have no idea.

What I am sure of is that the population will continue to fall vertiginously.  

Does it therefore matter who will rule this empty, chilly territory? 

If I had to guess, I'd follow Neagu Djuvara and Bernard Lewis and predict Lithuania and Europe become predominantly Muslim. 

No doubt the Catholic Lithuanians will not die out completely.  Some will still attend Mass, not the mosque.

Yesterday I spent in the second city Kaunas. It was the capital between the wars while Vilnius, whose population contained large Polish and Jewish communities and not many Lithuanians, was in Poland. 

Kaunas is very beautiful, with fine churches and and a wonderful large square. Catholic baroque order imposed on the savage east.

Its castle was rebuilt by the Communists. 

But the weather was cold and the wind blew shrewdly. It was a mistake to come here in April. I regretted my overcoat left in the car.

It was my friend Kevin's idea, actually. 

When Kaunas was the capital between the wars all seemed well until Bolshevik Russia took over, then the Germans and then the Bolsheviks again. 

On the journey to Klaipeda I read this on the subject of Jewish response to the first Soviet invasion.

On the eve of the first Soviet invasion the Lithuanian Communist Party had 1,600 members mostly underground, of whom almost half were not ethnic Lithuanians but Lithuanian Jews and Russians. The Communist party in Lithuania was small and illegal. Communists were considered traitors by most people for the same reason as in Romania and Poland: the Comintern's policy was to extend Soviet rule to much of what had been Czarist Russia in 1914.

Many Lithuanian Jews became Communists for many reasons after the Soviet invasion and were ostentatious about it. This was especially the case with some young Jews. Many other Jews disliked the Bolsheviks but they necessarily kept very quiet. 

This is part of the reason for the savage violence by lo al young men towards Jews that broke out in the territories the Soviet armies left in 1941.

The history of the Communist Party in Lithuania seems to be one of struggle between ethnic Lithuanians, ethnic Russians and Jews.

Something similar happened in Communist Romania, Communist Hungary and Communist Poland. 

Marx's and Lenin’s biggest mistake of all was  to assume that economics was reality and determines culture, nations and religion, when it's the other way around.