Soviet Policy toward the Baltic States 1918–1940
Institucijų Kūrimas
Building Institutions · 1955–1964
Published in 1959 during the Building Institutions period.
This 1959 scholarly monograph by Lithuanian-born Dr. Albert N. Tarulis is one of the earliest English-language academic treatments of Soviet annexation policy toward all three Baltic states, published at a major American Catholic university press. Written by a diaspora Lithuanian scholar drawing on memoirs, official documents, and Congressional testimony unavailable elsewhere in English, it served as a foundational text for Baltic advocacy in the Cold War West. Its dedication to the 40th anniversary of Lithuanian independence explicitly frames the scholarship as an act of political and cultural witness.
What It Is
The author's biography — visible in traces through the 'By the Same Author' page — reveals a pattern common among Lithuanian diaspora intellectuals: a 1946 Hanau publication (almost certainly produced in the DP camp system) followed by a 1947 Frankfurt publication, followed eventually by American academic integration. This trajectory from DP camp pamphleteer to Notre Dame Press author in thirteen years represents a remarkable institutional ascent, and the book itself encodes that journey: it is simultaneously a work of Cold War political science and a diaspora act of testimony, drawing on 'memoirs of people who took part in the events described and on his own correspondence with them,' much of which 'has never been published in English.' The book thus functions as a translation layer between Lithuanian-language survivor testimony and English-language academic and policy discourse.
Why It Matters
Published in 1959 — nineteen years into Soviet occupation and fourteen years after the end of World War II — this book represents the mature phase of Lithuanian diaspora scholarly advocacy, the moment when survivor-intellectuals who had fled through DP camps had gained enough footing in American academic institutions to publish with a major university press. Albert N. Tarulis is not merely documenting history; he is making a legal and moral argument before the English-speaking world that the Soviet incorporation of the Baltic states was illegitimate from its inception in 1918 and should remain non-recognized by Western governments. The dedication to the 40th anniversary of Lithuanian independence transforms the copyright page into a political manifesto, and the book's placement in Notre Dame's International Studies series — alongside titles on Soviet imperialism, East Central European fate, and democracy's failures — situates Lithuania within the broadest Cold War frame of the struggle between free nations and totalitarian expansion. This is a book written to matter, and it did.
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