Editing History of Lithuania (section)

==Soviet period (1944–1990)==
{{Main|Lithuanian SSR|Baltic states under Soviet rule (1944–91)}}

===Stalinist terror and resistance (1944–1953)===
{{Main|Soviet deportations from Lithuania|Lithuanian partisans}}
[[File:Lithuanian deportee house in Kolyma.jpeg|thumb|Lithuanian deportee house in [[Kolyma]] (1958).]]
The [[Soviet deportations from Lithuania]] between 1941 and 1952 resulted in the exile of thousands of families to [[forced settlements in the Soviet Union]], especially in [[Siberia]] and other remote parts of the country. Between 1944 and 1953, nearly 120,000 people (5% of the population) were deported,<ref name="Zagłada Żydów, piekło Litwinów"/> and thousands more became political prisoners. Many leading intellectual figures and most Catholic priests were among the deported; many returned to Lithuania after 1953. Approximately 20,000 [[Lithuanian partisans]] participated in unsuccessful warfare against the Soviet regime in the 1940s and early 1950s. Most were killed or deported to Siberian [[gulag]]s.<ref name="Snyder 95">Snyder (2003), p. 95</ref>{{efn|It was a sizable force in comparison with the similar number (20,000) of underground anti-communist fighters operating at that time in Poland. Poland was a country with an over eight times the population of Lithuania, but legal opposition (the [[Polish People's Party (1945–1949)|Polish People's Party]]) was primarily active there in the 1940s.<ref name="Dzień Żołnierzy Wyklętych. Cywilny opór czy III wojna? Rozmowa z dr hab. Rafałem Wnukiem">Paweł Wroński, ''Dzień Żołnierzy Wyklętych. Cywilny opór czy III wojna? Rozmowa z dr hab. Rafałem Wnukiem'' (The day of cursed soldiers. Civil resistance or World War III? Conversation with Professor [[Rafał Wnuk]]). [[Gazeta Wyborcza]] wyborcza.pl 01.03.2013</ref>}} During the years following the German surrender at the end of World War II in 1945, between 40 and 60 thousand civilians and combatants perished in the context of the anti-Soviet insurgency. Considerably more ethnic Lithuanians died after World War II than during it.<ref name="Zagłada Żydów, piekło Litwinów"/><ref>Robert van Voren. ''Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania''. Rodopi. 2011. p. 2.</ref>

Lithuanian armed resistance lasted until 1953. [[Adolfas Ramanauskas]] (code name 'Vanagas', translated to English: the [[hawk]]), the last official commander of the [[Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters]], was arrested in October 1956 and executed in November 1957.

===Soviet era (1953–1988)===
[[File:Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, Lithuania, 2021.jpg|thumb|225px|Former [[KGB]] headquarters in Vilnius, containing the [[Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights]].]]
<!-- [[WP:NFCC]] violation: [[File:Snieckus.jpg|thumb|left|250px|[[Antanas Sniečkus]] was the leader of the [[Communist Party of Lithuania]] for 34 years. He was instrumental to the [[Lithuanization]] of Vilnius and helped prevent the city from being [[Russification|Russified]].<ref name="Snyder 93">Snyder (2003), p. 93</ref>{{efn|Vilnius was claimed and contested by Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian communists before being granted by [[Joseph Stalin]] to the [[Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic|Lithuanian SSR]] in 1944.<ref name="Snyder 88, 93">Snyder (2003), pp. 88, 93</ref>}}]] -->
Soviet authorities encouraged the immigration of non-Lithuanian workers, especially Russians, as a way of integrating Lithuania into the Soviet Union and encouraging industrial development,<ref name="Department of State Lithuania"/> but in Lithuania this process did not assume the massive scale experienced by other European [[Republics of the Soviet Union|Soviet republics]].<ref name="Snyder 94">Snyder (2003), p. 94</ref>

To a great extent, [[Lithuanization]] rather than [[Russification]] took place in postwar Vilnius and elements of a national revival characterize the period of Lithuania's existence as a Soviet republic.<ref name="Snyder 72"/>{{efn|About 90% of Vilnius Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis in 1941–1944 and about 80% of Vilnius Poles were deported under the Soviet rule in 1944–1946, which left the city open to settlement by Lithuanians, or possibly Russians.<ref name="Snyder 72, 91">Snyder (2003), pp. 72, 91</ref>}} Lithuania's boundaries and political integrity were determined by Joseph Stalin's decision to grant Vilnius to the [[Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic|Lithuanian SSR]] again in 1944. Subsequently, most Poles were resettled from Vilnius (but only a minority from the countryside and other parts of the Lithuanian SSR){{efn|The preservation of the rural Polish-speaking minority in the Vilnius Region (the [[intelligentsia]] element was mostly expelled after the war) turned out to be a source of lasting friction. After 1950 Stalin, playing on the Lithuanian against the Polish insecurities, allowed the formation of a network of Polish, communist ideology-preaching schools. This Soviet policy continued also after 1956, despite Lithuanian objections. The Polish community reacted with fear to the rebirth of assertive Lithuanian nationalism after 1988 and attempted to established a Polish autonomy in the Vilnius region in 1990–91. After some Polish activists supported the attempted [[1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt|communist coup in Moscow]] the Lithuanian authorities eliminated the Polish self-rule. The presently existing [[Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania]] is seen by many Lithuanians as a communist rule residue with a nationalistic tint and conflicts over the language of education and naming rights continue, with an uneasy involvement of the government of Poland. The rural Polish-speaking areas are among the economically most depressed regions of Lithuania and high unemployment there has caused significant permanent emigration. The Lithuanian relations with the Russian minority, the actual left-over of the Soviet-imposed settlement, have not been a source of comparable tensions.<ref name="Polskość zapeklowana">''Polskość zapeklowana'' [Polishness cured]. Aleksandra Pezda's conversation with the historian [[Krzysztof Buchowski]]. Gazeta Wyborcza wyborcza.pl 16.03.2012</ref>}} by the implementation of Soviet and Lithuanian communist policies that mandated their partial replacement by [[Russian diaspora in the Baltic states|Russian immigrants]]. Vilnius was then increasingly settled by Lithuanians and assimilated by Lithuanian culture, which fulfilled, albeit under the oppressive and limiting conditions of the Soviet rule, the long-held dream of Lithuanian nationalists.<ref name="Snyder 91-93">Snyder (2003), pp. 91–93</ref> The economy of Lithuania did well in comparison with other regions of the Soviet Union.<ref name="True Lithuania"/>

The national developments in Lithuania followed tacit compromise agreements worked out by the Soviet communists, Lithuanian communists and the Lithuanian [[intelligentsia]]. [[Vilnius University]] was reopened after the war, operating in the Lithuanian language and with a largely Lithuanian student body. It became a center for Baltic studies. General schools in the Lithuanian SSR provided more instruction in Lithuanian than at any previous time in the country's history. The literary Lithuanian language was standardized and refined further as a language of scholarship and [[Lithuanian literature]]. The price the Lithuanian intelligentsia ended up paying for the national privileges was their much increased [[Communist Party of Lithuania|Communist Party]] membership after [[de-Stalinization]].<ref name="Snyder 93-95">Snyder (2003), pp. 93–95</ref>

Between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the [[glasnost]] and [[perestroika]] reforms of [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] in the mid-1980s, Lithuania functioned as a Soviet society, with all its repressions and peculiarities. Agriculture remained collectivized, property nationalized, and criticism of the Soviet system was severely punished. The country remained largely isolated from the non-Soviet world because of travel restrictions, the [[Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union|persecution of the Catholic Church]] continued and the nominally [[Egalitarianism|egalitarian]] society was extensively corrupted by the practice of connections and privileges for those who served the system.<ref name="True Lithuania"/>

The communist era is represented in the museum of [[Grūtas Park]].

===Rebirth (1988–1990)===
<!-- This section is linked from [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] -->
{{Main|Singing Revolution#Lithuania}}
[[File:A rally in Lithuania commemorate and condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, August 23, 1988, Vilnius, Vingis Park.jpg|thumb|right|An [[Anti-Soviet]] rally in [[Vingis Park]] of about 250,000 people. [[Sąjūdis]] was a movement which led to the restoration of an Independent State of Lithuania.]]
Until mid-1988, all political, economic, and cultural life was controlled by the [[Communist Party of Lithuania]] (CPL). Lithuanians as well as people in the other two [[Baltic states|Baltic republics]] distrusted the Soviet regime even more than people in other regions of the Soviet state, and they gave their own specific and active support to [[Mikhail Gorbachev]]'s program of social and political reforms known as [[perestroika]] and [[glasnost]]. Under the leadership of intellectuals, the Reform Movement of Lithuania [[Sąjūdis]] was formed in mid-1988, and it declared a program of democratic and national rights, winning nationwide popularity. Inspired by Sąjūdis, the [[Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR]] passed constitutional amendments on the supremacy of Lithuanian laws over Soviet legislation, annulled the 1940 decisions on proclaiming Lithuania a part of the Soviet Union, legalized a multi-party system, and adopted a number of other important decisions, including the return of the national state symbols — the [[flag of Lithuania]] and the [[Tautiška giesmė|national anthem]]. A large number of CPL members also supported the ideas of Sąjūdis, and with Sąjūdis support, [[Algirdas Brazauskas]] was elected First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPL in 1988. On 23 August 1989, 50 years after the [[Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact]], Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians joined hands in a human chain that stretched 600 kilometres from [[Tallinn]] to Vilnius in order to draw the world's attention to the fate of the Baltic nations. The human chain was called the [[Baltic Way]]. In December 1989, the Brazauskas-led CPL declared its independence from the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] and became a separate [[Social democracy|social democratic]] party, renaming itself the [[Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania]] in 1990.