Darius Pocevičius (writer, researcher and author of historical studies on Vilnius)
Lithuanian historiography has paid little attention to the social unrest in Vilnius in 1905-1907, which can be called both a revolution and a social war. Inter-war Lithuanian historians concentrated more on the events in Kaunas and the Lithuanian provinces, whereas Soviet historians seemed not to notice the anarchists of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905-1907 at all. In the last third of the century, attention has been focused on the nationalist anti-imperialist movement, which officially emerged during the Lithuanian Congress of December 1905, today pathetically called the Great Seimas of Vilnius.
The logic of such attitudes is difficult to grasp, since the social war declared by anarchists and other leftists in 1905-1907 was no less, if not more, explosive in its anti-imperialist nature, making a significant contribution to the liberalization and democratization of Lithuanian society, which was part of the Russian Empire then. The two approaches, the national and the social, should not compete and overshadow each other in contemporary research. Researching the social aspects would greatly complement and diversify the national discourse and the ethnic dimension of the events of 1905-1918 that dominate today. Many important events and personalities that are forgotten today would come to light. Ultimately, when these two discourses merge into one, it would shed a light on the extremely mixed and contrasting picture of the historical events of the early 20th century.
The talk looks at the activities of anarchist groups in Vilnius at that time, which began in March 1904, when two Vilnius residents who had become anarchists in exile, Daniil Burakishky from London and Zalman Borkagan from Paris, returned to Vilnius to set up a group of anarchists. The presentation examines the contribution of Vilnius anarchists to the 1905-1907 unrest, to the events of Bloody Sunday (October 16, 1905) and Bloody Friday (October 21, 1905), and to the October 27, 1905 incident at the Church of St. Catherine, which became the culmination of the disturbances in Lithuania’s future capital, when an eighteen-year-old anarchist, Jakob Korotki, threw a bomb at the Vilnius Chief of Police, who was on his way to the Governor’s office from a meeting together with the city’s four police district commissioners.
The presentation talks about the most active anarchists in Vilnius, among whom the Panevėžys-born Ilya Geitzman, known as Chaim the Londoner, stood out; the most important anarchist publications and conferences; the ideological platform of the Kropotkin anarchism in Vilnius, which was negatively influenced by the ideology of the “Black Flaggers” from Białystok that advocated total terror of the officials and exploiters, and constant bloody rebellion; the changing reaction of the Vilnius society to the anarchists, who were bombing and confiscating property, as well as the overall anarchist resistance and the causes and consequences of the defeat of the revolution in 1905-1907. Finally, the presentation explains why it is important to fill in the gaps in historical memory and summarizes the paths that had been taken and could have been taken to the present-day Lithuania.