LAUSR

A large crowd had gathered at Vilnius Airport (Lithuania) on March 31, 2017 and appeared to be waiting for something. Among the gathered was the government chancellor, three ministers, and many other well-known public figures. The scene at the airport was being shown on the national broadcaster, and later on news reports on all the channels. Readers would be amiss thinking that this crowd was waiting for a sports team (more likely a Lithuanian basketball team than a Lithuanian football team, alas), which had just won top position at a championship. They were in fact waiting for a little-known scientist at the time, Liudas Mažylis, who, as was announced, had found the declaration of Lithuanian independence from 1918 in a German archive. Until then, the Lithuanian state did not have its own original “birth certificate.” No one cared about the opinion of professional historians that the discovered document should be called differently and more precisely. Mažylis became a national hero and a TV star, while the document’s exposition turned it into a mass pilgrimage object. All of this happened while central and east European states were marking the centenaries of their independence, and as a rule highlighting 1917 (Finland) or 1918 (the rest of east central Europe) as a fundamental turningpoint, a time of liberation from the imperial “prison of nations”; also accentuating the bonds between today’s states and their continuity with the states established post-World War I. Both national government institutions and the public joined in the commemoration of the centenary, especially in the Baltic states and Poland. An additional stimulus for the sincere involvement of society in marking the anniversary in these countries was undoubtedly the Russian annexation of Crimea and its support for east Ukrainian separatists. The mentioned events in Ukraine exposed the insecurity of other states in the “shatterzones of empires” (Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz), thus, the celebration of the centenaries was meant to testify the longevity of these countries.1 The interwar period is certainly important in the cultural memory of these countries, not only because it allows elites to legitimize the continuity of their states, but also because of the influence on political decisions. As Andres Kasekamp claims in this forum, the failure of central and east European states to create stable inter-state alliances in the interwar years of 1918–39, and to resist the Nazi and Soviet aggressions that followed was the