Pirmasis Nepriklausomos Lietuvos Dešimtmetis 1918–1928

Institucijų Kūrimas

Building Institutions · 1955–1964

Published in 1955 during the Building Institutions period.

What It Is

This volume is a crystalline artifact of diaspora institutional infrastructure at its most ambitious: a London-based exile press, organized as a subscription book club (knygų klubas), mobilizing a global Lithuanian readership to finance, produce, and distribute a canonical historical text at a moment when the Soviet occupation had rendered such publication impossible within Lithuania itself. The Nidos Knygų Klubo model — numbered editions, named print crews, a formal series — mirrors the institutional seriousness of a state publishing house, deliberately asserting that Lithuanian cultural and intellectual life would continue in exile with full professional standards. The choice to reprint the 1928 jubilee volume in 1955 is itself a profound cultural statement: exactly as the Soviet occupation was consolidating its hold on Lithuanian memory and historiography, the diaspora was re-anchoring collective identity to the founding moment of independence, insisting on the continuity of the First Republic as the legitimate frame for Lithuanian national life. The authorship collective — Klimas, Yčas, Kemėšis, Purickis, Savickis — represents the cream of interwar Lithuanian political and diplomatic leadership, most of them by 1955 living in exile or deceased. Their firsthand accounts of state-building, international diplomacy (including Lithuanian lobbying in Switzerland and Scandinavia during WWI), and the parliamentary era carry an authority no secondary historian could replicate. For diaspora readers in 1955, this was not merely history — it was testimony from men who had been there, preserving the record against Soviet falsification. The volume thus functions simultaneously as primary source, memorial act, and political counter-narrative. For diaspora youth and heritage schools like Žiburio, the circulation of this book — evidenced by its presence in the school's collection — meant that students could encounter independence-era Lithuanian in its most authoritative prose register: the language of statesmen, diplomats, and parliamentarians writing at the height of interwar national culture. This is the Lithuanian of Vasario 16, of the Seimas, of international recognition — the foundational vocabulary of Lithuanian civic and national identity, preserved and transmitted precisely through institutions like Nida Press and Žiburio School.

Why It Matters

Culturally and historically, this book is among the most significant primary sources on the founding of the Lithuanian state that diaspora publishing made available. Written by five of the central figures of the independence movement — a signatory of the Act of Independence, a Duma politician who lobbied Tsarist Russia, a diplomat who worked the Swiss and Scandinavian corridors during WWI, and a parliamentarian who shaped the Seimas era — it is not a commemorative retrospective but a living testimony, produced by men who understood that Soviet occupation was erasing their version of events from accessible memory. The 1955 reprint date is not coincidental: it arrives in the decade when it became clear that occupation would not be brief, and that the diaspora would need to sustain Lithuanian historical consciousness for at least a generation. Nida Press's decision to make this the seventh volume in its prestigious book club series signals exactly how the exile intellectual community prioritized this text.