Dispatch from Perloja How the shattering of empires after WWI turned one tiny Lithuanian village into a ‘republic’
Story by Will Mawhood for The Beet. Edited by Eilish Hart.
This story first appeared in The Beet, a monthly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.
Among the quirkier sights in Lithuania’s capital is the tiny self-declared Republic of Užupis, located in a historically bohemian, though now increasingly gentrified, neighborhood caught in a meander in the River Vilnelė. Established in 1997 by a group of artists, the republic marks its independence on April Fools’ Day and boasts an absurdist 41-clause constitution posted on a public wall. Translated into many languages, it reminds citizens that “everyone has the right to appreciate their unimportance” and “a cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in times of need.”
The surrounding region has a reputation for small, eccentric “republics” seemingly held together by nothing more than the force of an appealing idea. Not far from Vilnius are the ruins of the 18th-century Republic of Paulava. Created by an idealistic Polish nobleman on his estate, this republic gained state recognition and lasted for 26 years (motivated by utopian principles, the nobleman set up a peasants’ parliament for his serfs, who duly elected him president for life).
And just off the main highway running southwest from the capital, where the roadside patches of forest start to turn deeper and darker, you’ll find another erstwhile republic: the small settlement of Perloja.
A carved wooden sculpture in the UNESCO-recognized Lithuanian traditional style marks the entrance to the village, which is home to a little under 500 souls today. Notched into the sculpture’s spindly but sturdy frame are scalloped shapes resembling ears of corn, an open book, and a miniature gable roof. A short walk away is the central square, lined with timber-framed and brick houses, most in gentle shades of yellow. Here, a redbrick Neo-Gothic church faces a sword-brandishing statue of the medieval ruler Vytautas the Great, under whose reign the Grand Duchy of Lithuania came to reach as far as the Black Sea. The text below declares: “You will live as long as at least one Lithuanian is alive.”
Sleepy Perloja certainly doesn’t look like a capital, and with its deep-Lithuania signifiers, it doesn’t seem like it ever could have aspired to a separate status, even by happenstance. But the story of the so-called Republic of Perloja is perhaps even more peculiar (and certainly more action-packed) than its equivalents in and around Vilnius.
‘Let them guard the gates’
Perloja lies somewhere in the center of the loosely defined ethnographic region of Dzūkija: a thickly forested and deeply impoverished stretch of land with few natural borders, where speakers of Lithuanian, Polish, and Belarusian had lived alongside one another for centuries. Though never a large settlement, Perloja found itself in a significant location, on a road that could lead travellers from Vilnius to Prussia, the now-Belarusian city of Hrodno, or even to Kraków, the then-capital of Poland, which formed a union with Lithuania in 1385.
The village has a history of proud intransigence. According to 15th-century records, the people of Perloja made a direct appeal to Alexander Jagiellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, against the local administrator’s high-handed treatment and expectation of hitherto undemanded services — namely, transporting wood and grain to the nearby town of Trakai, and demanding food — and invoking historic privileges. The monarch upheld their complaint, ruling, “Let them serve us in road service, let them guard the gates, and let them give tribute according to the old customs, as they used to serve and give tribute before.”
The Republic of Perloja — or, perhaps more accurately, the self-governing territory of Perloja — was declared on November 13, 1918, two days after the armistice that ended World War I. Asserting the need to protect themselves, leaders from the village and surrounding hamlets elected a five-member autonomous parish committee and chose local lad Jonas Česnulevičius as their leader, a 21-year-old veteran of the Russian military who served on the Galician and Romanian fronts during the war.
But who were they seeking protection from, exactly? As the months that followed would show, more or less everyone.
In the aftermath of the armistice on the Western front, the immediate danger came primarily from German troops streaming westward from Vilnius and other cities in the region they had occupied since 1915. With the loose discipline of the defeated, some behaved like marauding bands, terrorizing the rural population and stealing animals as they went.
On a trip to Vilnius earlier that month, Česnulevičius had spotted heavily armed members of the Samoobrona — paramilitary “self-defense” formations loyal to the Polish state only just resurrected in Warsaw — and observed increasing communist agitation. The collapse of the central government in a part of the world with overlapping national aspirations and growing ideological ferment was sure to lead to very complicated conflicts. In many places, it simply led to chaos.
Governing the parish
Despite Česnulevičius’s military experience, a man named Juozas Lukoševičius was appointed head of both Perloja’s army and police force. A local, Jokūbas Vasieta, had buried a cache of weapons and ammunition during the war years — and duly equipped, the Perlojan armed forces came to consist of around 80 men, some only teenagers.
At this point, Perloja’s military strength outnumbered the country it seemed to identify with. At the tail end of 1918, Lithuania had no army of its own, and its very existence as a state was amorphous and questionable. A body of local notables known as the Taryba (Council) had declared independence in Vilnius that February, but strict wartime censorship meant that few people were even aware of this. Moreover, it was unclear what territory, if any, this revived Lithuanian state realistically controlled and what it laid claim to: Though medieval Lithuania had been vast, the area predominantly populated by native Lithuanian speakers was much smaller.
The leader of the first national government, Prime Minister Augustinas Voldemaras, initially held that as Lithuania would be a neutral state, it had no need for military capabilities — although he did call for the formation of militias in the countryside.
Meanwhile, Perloja got on with the business of governing the parish, with locals taking up not only military posts but also other official positions, indicating aspirations to something like a civilian administration. Česnulevičius became head of the local courts, which began to hear cases, including a murder that was never solved and an adultery case that reportedly saw a defendant threatened with a pistol brandished from the bench. The local hospital’s basement served as a prison for wrongdoers.
The tiny Perloja cabinet also boasted a sanitation minister, a title that had never existed in any Lithuanian government. Its bearer, Zigmas Krivas, was tasked with ensuring general cleanliness. The Perlojan government also paid special attention to securing the surrounding woodland’s safety (and productivity), with two officials assigned to forestry.
‘The Perlojan people never trusted strangers’
Fifty-odd miles away, multiple countries and aspiring state formations were laying claim to Vilnius; by one calculation, the city changed hands seven times in the years immediately after World War I. Perloja generally experienced these shifts in power with a short delay, as the new order filtered out slowly to the forests of Dzūkija.
In December 1918, local communist Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas declared Lithuania a Soviet Socialist Republic. The Red Army entered the city early the next month, granting the revolutionary government muscle and authority. A backwoods town in a country with a tiny industrial working class could hardly have seemed a hotbed of Marxist revolution. And yet, when they arrived in Perloja, the Bolshevik revolutionaries faced little resistance (apparently due to the fact that they were fighting the Perlojans’ stated enemies, the Poles and Germans).
The Reds, in turn, did remarkably little to interfere with Perloja’s de facto autonomy, demanding only that the parish administration change its name to revkom (short for “revolutionary committee”). Perlojan officials complied, though the army hid their weapons.
Of all the multiple factions feuding for control of the region, the Perlojans seem to have been partisan towards independent Lithuania. According to Marija Lūžytė, the director of the Perloja History Museum, this was because the area was Lithuanian-speaking and “there were no noblemen” (Polish language and identity in Lithuania was disproportionately associated with the landed classes); memories of the ancient privileges granted by the Grand Duke may have played a role, too.
Nonetheless, Vladas Aravičius, a Lithuanian rifleman from elsewhere who worked with the Perlojan defence forces in the early 1920s, observed in his memoirs that “the Perlojan people never trusted strangers, even if they were Lithuanians.” This spiky suspiciousness may have proved their undoing.
By April 1919, the Bolsheviks had withdrawn from the district, and the freshly constituted Lithuanian army was marching along the nearby highway when they came under fire from Perloja, which received no notice of the troop movements. Taken by surprise, the army retreated to the town of Varėna a few miles away, then returned and shelled Perloja. Česnulevičius and Lukoševičius were captured and taken to the temporary capital of Kaunas, 50 miles to the north, where they were interrogated and released a month later. These events marked the end of Perloja as a fully autonomous entity.
‘A separate state at every railway station’
The shattering of empires across Europe in 1918 produced some shards that were very small indeed. Some were even slightly comical: in western Germany, the so-called Free State of Bottleneck (Freistaat Flaschenhals) emerged due to the literal spheres of French and American occupation failing to meet up completely. (Bottleneck based its economy largely on smuggling, at one point hijacking a French coal train to provide heating for its isolated population.)
But micro-states and quasi-states were overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the continent’s eastern half. “As many municipalities as there were, that’s how many republics there were in Poland; indeed, a separate state at every railway station,” remembered the country’s second prime minister, Jędrzej Moraczewski.
Within this context of uncertain governance and widespread chaos, what was so remarkable about Perloja?
“The case of paramilitary self-rule in Perloja is exceptional for its longevity. From November 1918 to May 1919, the armed Perloja band (made up of local Lithuanian Catholics) was totally independent and autonomous,” explains Tomas Balkelis, a researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius, who has written about the variety of quasi-states that popped up across Lithuania after World War I.
As for Perloja’s legacy today, it continues to be a source of intrigue among Lithuanians. It’s been the subject of many newspaper articles, one novel (written by a Lithuanian living in exile in the U.S. after World War II), and an hour-long documentary by the state broadcaster LRT. In a cheeky touch, one 2009 article pointedly mentions that Perloja declared its independence several days before neighboring Latvia.
Perloja comes up frequently in compendiums of weird and wonderful worldwide statelets, too, although the relative lack of information about the village in languages other than Lithuanian has bred mistakes and myths. For instance, many English-language sources wrongly claim that it had its own currency, the Perloja litas.
According to Lūžytė, it’s not even entirely clear that Perlojans ever used the word “republic” to describe their de facto government: initially, it was merely thought of as a parish committee. The museum director says that outsiders were the first to apply this term. In the interwar period, nationally minded journalists saw Perloja’s defiant stance against Lithuania’s enemies as fodder for a patriotic narrative, although they usually glossed over the village’s clash with the Lithuanian army.
‘For Perloja and all Lithuania’
Shortly after Perloja’s effective absorption into Lithuania in 1919, the entire village came under Polish control. Though the two militaries had collaborated to drive the Soviets from Lithuania, they soon clashed over overlapping territorial claims (Česnulevičius would be arrested again, this time by the new authorities, after Perlojans looted a Polish weapons store).
Even after the uneasy peace reached in 1920, the de facto border followed the shallow River Merkys that flows off-center through Perloja, leaving a few houses and outlying farms in Poland. Locals referred to the slice of the village across the border as anošalis, meaning “the other land.”
So bitter was the interwar dispute between Lithuania and Poland (primarily over Vilnius) that there was no postal service across the border, and railway tracks were torn up. But in Perloja, locals were allowed to cross the river, usually to attend mass at the church on the Lithuanian side — and some took the opportunity to smuggle in their underclothes information about Polish troop movements.
If their attack on Lithuanian troops cast doubt over their patriotism, Perlojans made up for it in the following years. In 1920, the Perloja self-defense forces were converted into a unit of the šauliai (riflemen), a state-sponsored paramilitary force akin to a home guard. Nevertheless, they still seemed to march to the beat of their own drum: After several Perlojans returned from a successful covert mission in 1923 to extend Lithuanian sovereignty over the League of Nations-administered port city of Klaipėda, they mounted a unilateral attack on the Polish side of Perloja that left two villagers dead.
Despite the troubles of the decades that followed, Perloja managed to maintain a strong Lithuanian identity. Beginning at the outset of World War II, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries saw symbols of their previous independence banned throughout the region. Perloja’s statue of Vytautas, however, was the only one of its kind to survive the occupation, despite attempts to destroy it. The colorful frescos in the local church, painted during the war and prominently featuring Lithuanian flags and national symbols, somehow evaded removal, too. As did the village’s unofficial but enduring motto, Už Perloją ir visą Lietuvą —“For Perloja and all Lithuania.”
The Perlojans’ pugnacious reputation seems to have stood the test of time, as well. Balkelis, the historian, grew up in nearby Varėna and says he remembers hearing residents of Perloja referred to as “people who carry knives in their pockets.” It’s not hard to understand why Česnulevičius’s daughter, Petronėlė Česnulevičiūtė, penned a non-fiction work in the 1990s titled, Fighting Perloja.
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers like you. Please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign.
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Story by Will Mawhood for The Beet
Edited by Eilish Hart