ENThe modernist post-war spatial organisation and territorial planning was a strictly hierarchical network, guided by the principle of development from the centre to the periphery and best revealed through an examination of regional planning, the functional zoning, and the urbanisation of rural areas. This paper presents a vast environmental-territorial transformation of rural Lithuania under the Soviet occupation period in 1940-1990, during which the forced collectivisation of agriculture resulted in new territorial development. As a reaction to functionalist approach, the regionalist trends were started to be manifested in late 1970s. Keywords: Rural modernization; Regional planning; Modern Lithuania. [From the publication]