[BRIEF NOTE] The Poles of Lithuania

[rfmcdonald]

Of the three Baltic States, Latvia has the most strongly multiethnic population, with large Russophone minorities everywhere in the country and Russophone pluralities and even majorities in some rural districts and urban areas, including the capital city of Rîga. Estonia's population is also multiethnic but to a lesser degree, with more than two-thirds of its non-Estonian population living in only two of Estonia's fifteen counties, in Harju County including the capital of Tallinn and in the highly industrialized Ida-Viru County in the northeast on the Russian frontier. As Peteris Zvidrins explains in "Changes in the Ethnic Structure of the Baltic Countries" (PDF format), the Soviet-era immigration of workers is responsible for most of Estonia's new ethnic diversity and much of Latvia's. Before 1940, there were certainly substantial enclaves of ethnic minorities in both countries--Russophones on their eastern frontiers and in their capital cities, Swedes on the Estonian coast, Jews and Poles in Latvia--but there weren't so many as no and they certainly weren't as large.

Somewhat surprisingly considering Lithuania's history, it's Lithuania that now has the most ethnically homogeneous population of the three Baltic States, the proportion of ethnic Lithuanians in Lithuania's post-1940 frontiers remaining stable at four-fifths of the total population. Russians form a large minority in Lithuania, but they predominate only in the city of Visaginas, built in the 1970s around the Ignalina nuclear power plant. The second-largest ethnolinguistic communities in Estonia and Latvia are Russophone; in Lithuania, that place is filled by Lithuania's Polish minority. The Russophones of Latvia and Estonia have their particular concentrations, and the Poles of Lithuania can claim the same, concentrated in Vilnius County, forming population majotrities in the Salčininkai and Vilnius district municipalities and strong minorities in the city of Vilnius proper and the Trakai district municipality.

The Poles of southeastern Lithuania form, by the standards of post-1945 central and eastern Europe, the most kresy, of the Polish east. Marzena Kisielowska-Lipman's 1999 essay "The echoing Polish borderlands" (PDF format) talks at great length of the continuing sentimental attachment of Poles to what used to be the east of their country--in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine--and the ways in which it's deployed to try to build a new relationship. The friendly and warm Polish-Lithuanian relationship, for instance, and Poland's support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution, are products of this sentiment. The remaining Polish minorities in Belarus and Ukraine are highly dispersed, though, perhaps doomed to assimilation and/or mass emigration to a richer Poland. The Poles of Lithuania are unique--among Polish minorities in eastern Europe as among minority populations in the Baltic States--in remaining a compact and well-organized population with a distinct territory and a supportive government. It'll be interesting to see how they'll evolve in the next generation.