Alfred Erich Senn - Lithuania 1940; Revolution from Above (2007).jpg

In his monograph, Prof. Alfred Erich Senn reconstructs the last years of the modern Lithuanian state: from the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which constituted the background for the Red Army occupation of Lithuania, until the formal annexation of Lithuania by the USSR. This well-known story is told originally and interestingly. The author uses a lot of historical literature and plenty of new archival materials from Lithuanian, Russian, American and Latvian archives.

The author had been provoked to make this research by the assertion of officials that Lithuania became a part of the USSR not by force, but by self-determination. This position practically reintroduces a version of the Soviet historiographic claim about socialist revolution in Lithuania in 1940. Senn’s main counterargument is that the whole political process was orchestrated by Moscow’s proconsul Vladimir Dekanozov (the “Revolution from above”) after the occupation of Lithuania on June 15, 1940. Consequently the argumentation about the self-determination of Lithuania collapses like a house of cards.

On the other hand, the author gives a stunning picture of how the Lithuanian state disintegrated with the collapse of Smetona’s authoritarian regime (like a “house of cards”, too), influenced by social and ethnic conflicts. Even a heretical question could be raised – were there other elements of statehood in Lithuania apart from the authoritarian regime of Smetona? Supplementary questions remain open: What was the balance between expansion and security motives in Stalin’s policy? Is it possible to identify in the Kremlin’s decisions some differences between the sovietization and the incorporation of Lithuania? The last question is probably the most intriguing, and some details given in the book indicate that such differences existed (pp. 120–121, 125). However the author himself unfortunately rejects such a possibility (p. 124). The question remains open for further scholarly research, though at an ideological level the quarrel about the “zero sum” balance still is up-to-date.

Nonetheless, Senn’s main idea is connected with the revolution that took place in Lithuania in 1940. Although the author uses the term “revolution” with the adjective “from above,” it is very questionable whether it is possible to separate the revolutions “from above” and “from below”. The question does not aim at a scholarly definition; to the contrary, it refers back to the Lithuanian “collective memory” which, according to Senn, was “fractionalized into antagonistic sections” by the Soviet invasion: aside from the issue of the socialist revolution in 1940, another version indicates that the Resistance movement came into being just on June 15, 1940 (pp. 3–4).