‘For most of the outside world, “the Baltics” form a convenient package,’ begins Dr Richard Butterwick, in his new survey Lithuania: A History, released in August in some European markets and December elsewhere. ‘But the three countries are very different. Especially Lithuania.’
As Butterwick demonstrates, Lithuania’s history is indeed intertwined with those of neighbours, but they are Poland, Belarus and, to a lesser extent, Russia. One of the challenges of any Lithuanian historical account is incorporating enough essential elements of these interconnected histories to make sense of the target nation without straying too far off topic. Similarly, the historian must consider wide expanses of territory that have been linked to various entities known as ‘Lithuania’, while remaining relevant to the modern state that exists today. Butterwick manages these tasks admirably.
Furthermore, it has long been conventional wisdom that certain narratives of ‘Lithuanian’ history must necessarily come at the expense of Polish or Belarusian achievements. Perhaps Butterwick is particularly suited to tackle this challenge, as he is an established historian of both Poland and Lithuania. This account is decidedly fair to competing claims on, for example, the national identity of Adam Mickiewicz. At various times, Butterwick commends modern Lithuanian and Polish historians for better understanding their neighbours.
Dr Butterwick insists the study is aimed at ‘visitors’ or ‘travellers who need to be able to find places on a map or the internet’, but here he seems overly humble. Rare is the tourist who will wade through the exploits of Vytautas, Gediminas, Mindaugas and Jogaila. Surely most outside the field of Lithuanian history can consult it as a reputable research text.
One Irish Times reviewer noted ‘a rather plodding prose style’, but this is unfair. (In typical Irish journalistic fashion, he also seized on one sentence describing a decline in Catholic Church influence to form a centrepiece for the review.) Butterwick is charming, even funny, especially in the first half of his account. For example, Elizabeth Habsburg ‘was no beauty, but the austere Casimir proved an uxorious husband.’ ‘Beyond doubt is Algirdas’s virility. He sired at least 20 children from his two marriages.’ Warranting a different sort of chuckle: ‘I refuse to call Königsberg “Kaliningrad” before 1945’.
On the infamous parallels between Sanskrit and modern Lithuanian, Butterworth takes a diplomatic position: ‘Lithuanian is usually considered to have preserved more of the proto-Indo-European spoken 5,000 years ago than any other living language. Its similarities to ancient Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin have been noticed for centuries.’ Hungarians might draw comparisons to the controversial claim that they are descended from the Huns.
Though several borders separate the modern states of Hungary and Lithuania, Hungarian readers will find some common history, particularly before the 17th century. ‘The Kingdom of Hungary, which then extended as far as the Carpathian Mountains, also played a major part in these [13th-century] struggles’, we read. ‘The dynasty lost Hungary and Bohemia in 1526. The Jagiellons are remembered in those countries—when they are recalled at all—as feckless and weak.’ Then, surely more controversial to Hungarian readers, ‘the passionate desire to regain Vilnius [then Polish Wilno] might be compared to Hungarians’ outrage at the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which had deprived them of two-thirds of their population and territory.’
‘On pushing a modern political narrative, Butterwick’s Lithuania is a mixed bag, though it might very easily have performed better on this front’
On pushing a modern political narrative, Butterwick’s Lithuania is a mixed bag, though it might very easily have performed better on this front. Butterwick scorns the current regime in Moscow, which is a reasonable position, and perhaps the only reasonable position on that subject. Sadly, his tendentious tone detracts from the reading experience at times. The reader confronts ‘the textbook of appeasement’, Vladimir Putin’s ‘rant to the 2007 Munich security conference’, ‘Putin’s incarnation of empire’, and ‘the corrupt mire of dependency on the Kremlin’, to name a few. Surely an educated reader does not require such heavy-handed editorializing. Butterwick presumably understood this when he wrote the chapters covering Molotov, Ribbentrop and associates.
Surely most of Butterwick’s readers will not be Russian revanchists, and this reviewer looked forward to reporting a fair, otherwise apolitical narrative, quite an achievement in 21st-century historical analysis. Sadly, just a handful of pages from the end, Butterwick serves up this drivel:
‘Traditional Catholic teaching on marriage, sex, contraception, abortion, and child-rearing is increasingly ignored or rejected, partly because many younger Lithuanians have embraced an ever-expanding range of sexual and gender identities. On the other hand, a recurring component of populist politics has been homophobic discourse. This has been linked (not least by the Kremlin’s online trolls) to stories that the European Union is determined to impose a “gender ideology” noxious to the constitutionally enshrined model of the Christian family.’
It is the equivalent of conceding a stoppage-time goal in football, such a jarring departure that this reviewer wonders whether an editor overlooked a section.
By contrast, the author does not devote time in his conclusion to attacks on Hungary, Slovakia, pre-2023 Poland, or other popular targets of European academic ire. In fact, his brief mention of deceased former Polish President Lech Kaczyński is rather charitable. A similarly brief reference to President Donald Trump is benign. Holocaust remembrance can often be a minefield in this region’s historiography, and Butterwick navigates it admirably. No modern Lithuanian politicians or political parties seem to receive preferential treatment.
Butterwick agreeably concludes with reflections from a trip to the so-called Dieveniškės appendix, a peninsular stretch of Lithuanian territory nearly surrounded by Belarus. He invites readers—not heavy-handedly here—to consider why this has become a highly fortified border zone with disrupted access to neighbours, churches, cemeteries, and stretches of once-uninterrupted farmland. How is it that one house here belongs to a generally free and prosperous Lithuania, while the next toils under the yoke of Lukashenko’s Belarus? Any satisfactory answer will not be Baltic, but uniquely Lithuanian.
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