Augustinas Voldemaras

Voldemaras, Augustinas 

Born Apr. 4 (16), 1883, in Disna, now Ignalin Raion, Lithuanian SSR; died Dec. 16, 1942, in Moscow. Political figure of bourgeois Lithuania who came from nobility.

Voldemaras graduated from the department of history and philology of the University of St. Petersburg (1909), where he was a docent from 1911 to 1914. He was a professor at the University of Perm’ from 1917. He participated in the St. Petersburg Lithuanian Seimas (May and June 1917) and belonged to its right wing. In November 1918 he became the first premier of the cabinet of ministers of the bourgeois Lithuanian state. He fled to Germany in December 1918 because of the approach of units of the Red Army and was chairman of bourgeois Lithuania’s delegation to the Versailles peace conference in Paris. In 1920 he began teaching in Lithuania. He was a deputy to the Seimas, a member of the Union of Lithuanian Nationalists (Tautininki), and one of the initiators of the fascist state coup. After the coup, on Dec. 17, 1926, he became prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of the Lithuanian government. He was removed from the government in 1929 because of his differences with other leaders of the Lithuanian nationalist movement. Voldemaras led a group that sought to establish a brutal fascist dictatorship. With the aid of this group, he attempted to stage a coup and return to power in June 1934. He was sentenced to a prison term of eight years but was amnestied in 1938. He was exiled from bourgeois Lithuania on several occasions, and in 1940 he was arrested by Soviet Lithuanian authorities.

A. ZHUKAS