Making the nation: refugees, indigent people, and Lithuanian relief, 1914-1920

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LTStraipsnyje aptariama lietuvių paramos organizacijų veikla etninės Lietuvos teritorijoje 1914–1920 metais. Dėl karo veiksmų Lietuvos paramos organizacijos, ypatingai "Lietuvių Draugija nukentėjusiems dėl karo šelpti", buvo priverstos veikti, kaip paralelinės organizacijos. Oberosto teritorijoje veikusios paramos organizacijos kėlė panašius tikslus, kaip ir tokio tipo organizacijos Rusijoje, nors materialinės sąlygos tikslų įgyvendinimui buvo blogesnės. Vokietijos valdžios institucijų nustatyti apribojimai vietos gyventojams suteikė paramos organizacijoms galimybę sukurti priklausomybę tarp savęs ir humanitarinės pagalbos gavėjų. 1914–1915 m. Šiaurės vakarų teritorijoje buvo sukurtas tankus vietinių pagalbos komitetų tinklas. Vokiečių okupacijos laikotarpiu šis tinklas dar labiau išaugo, jo dėka pagalbos sulaukė daugelis karo aukų. Savivaldybės Lietuvoje sukurtos 1918–1919 m., iki tol būtent pagalbos komitetai buvo Lietuvos administracinės struktūros pavyzdys, suteikiantis galimybę administruoti pagalbos, švietimo ir kultūros reikalus. Ši paramos struktūra spartino tautos telkimosi pastangas, ypač tarp pabėgėlių. Paramos organizacijų teiktos paslaugos stiprino tautiškumo potenciją Pabėgėliams ir nepasiturintiems asmenims paramos organizacijos garantavo specialųjį statusą. Parama tapo savotišku socialinės kontrolės įrankiu: materialinė pagalba buvo garantuojama mainais už tautinį ir politinį lojalumą. Lietuvos paramos organizacijos rūpinosi grįžtančiais pabėgėliais ir priėmė sprendimus, kuriais vėliau buvo grindžiama valstybės repatriacijos politika. Jos kėlė humanitarinės pagalbos tikslus, deklaravo kultūrinius bei politinius tautos kūrimo uždavinius.

ENThe First World War and the disintegration of the Tsarist Empire represented a turning point not only for the emergence of the Lithuanian nation state but also for renewed nation building in a region where a large proportion of the population lacked a clear national consciousness. Although half a million refugees were displaced to Russia in the summer of 1915, the majority of people who lived in the Northwest Territory of the Tsarist Empire remained within their homeland. However, many of them had to spend the war years far from their homes. They were helped by various local relief committees and associations that had been created at the beginning of the war. Recently, researchers pointed out that humanitarian aid during the First World War and after represented a highly competitive field in which different public and private actors, national and political movements, and webs of international solidarity competed with each other. Thus, besides humanitarian objectives, relief agencies cultivated other goals that grew out of the political activities of their members prior to the war and their desire to make aid recipients loyal to their political agendas. In other words, relief organizations were often quite open about their objective of creating a sense of dependence between the displaced people and themselves. In this chapter, I analyse how Lithuanian relief associations founded at the beginning of the war tried to create relations of dependence between themselves and the population groups they were trying to help in the territories of ethnic Lithuania. By 1920, the creation and “normalization” of the Lithuanian state progressively diminished the need for and tasks of these relief institutions.In particular, I investigate how the emergence of large masses of displaced people represented a chance for continuing and even strengthening the nation building process carried out by the relief associations. Firstly, I explore the emergence of Lithuanian relief committees, their structure and interactions with each other within the occupied territory. In particular, I focus on the question of how the displacement to Russia influenced the development of relief structures in Ober Ost. Secondly, I study the instruments that relief associations used to create networks of socio-political and national loyalty among displaced and indigent people. I study how the people were categorized, classified, and domesticated bearing in mind that, as subjects of their own lives, they often adopted alternative strategies of survival that in some cases clashed with the goals of the relief associations. Thirdly, I shed light on the role that relief associations played in organizing the repatriation of refugees from Russia from 1918 to 1920 when Lithuanian state institutions were still too weak to take care of refugees. Although, over the whole period of German occupation the Lithuanian relief effort was constantly challenged by the activity of Polish relief agencies, here I focus on the strategies adopted by the Lithuanians without analysing their conflicting relations with the Polish committees.