Whose City? Vilnius during World War I between Poles, Russians, Jews, and Lithuanians
Whose City? Vilnius during World War I between Poles, Russians, Jews, and Lithuanians

Summary/Abstract: The First World War transformed East-Central Europe. A region dominated by old-regime, multi-national empires in 1914 became by the early 1920s the birthplace of a number of young—or “resurrected”—would-be nation-states. The city of Vilnius reflects these radical changes. A provincial city in the Russian Empire inhabited by various national groups before the war, by 1917 was a pawn in the increasingly vociferous nationalist arguments between Poles and Lithuanians. While Russians had at least half-hearted claimed the city as “their own” before 1914, such arguments vanished with the departure of Russian authorities in 1915. As for the Jews, who in 1914 were probably the single largest ethnic group in the city, their livelihoods were particularly hard hit by the war. At war’s end they would be forced into a defensive position in the Polish-Lithuanian struggle that would determine the city’s future.

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